Guilt Quotes

It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.

How much suffering did you lay on yourself before you awakened and recognized that guilt is deadly, and empty, and profitless?

Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion

It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.

[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

It's funny how guilty people start to question your spirituality and education only because they have nothing to say that will justify their faults.

But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart.

…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

This guilt is a joke, and it’s exhausting to watch you martyr yourself.

A generous donor (who had no doubt lived a life that imperiled his mortal soul) had granted [the Sisters] more than one hundred waterfront acres.

Guilt is basically one of my superpowers. It’s been programmed into me from the moment I was old enough to know what it was.

Guilt loves the passive.

Just because you act a little guilty doesn't mean you're innocent.

But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.

Most injuries heal in time, but guilt is a cancer that knows where to hide.

My mother may no longer be (if she ever was) a mast to which I can rope myself. But I fear the loss of Lesley. Without her observance, and her sturdy presence, I would feel windblown.

Redemption was asking too much, but he could hope. Something told him he’d still be seeking absolution when he took his last breath on some distant day.

The problem with guilt was not how it attacks the present, but how it stained the past. Hindsight was a blemish on memory.

Somehow the sting of guilt was always more acute when there was a risk that she might get caught.

We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..

The back of my hand to guilt.

There is a good guilt and a bad guilt... the good one Leeds us to ask for forgiveness the bad Leeds us to hide from God.

Guilt is what makes you accountable.

Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.

Never under estimate the power of guilt, in the end it will find its way to destroy you. The more you try to turn your back on it, the easier it is for it to stab you in the back.

Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you.

We are not on our fours, howling in the woods, only because guilt saves us.

And guilt is heavy, like an anchor holding me in place and hindering any and all advancement.

Intentions are nothing

All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.

But guilt isn't smart. It isn't logical. It doesn't only live in the places it belongs.

We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.

Safety is only an illusion when evil is on the hunt. I can't stand by and watch. I have to act. It isn't easy to absolve one's self of guilt.

Guilt rarely listens to reason ...

I was a woman unaccustomed to guilt, and it drowned me - pulling me deeper, cutting off my air supply.

more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.

When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.

She's still clinging to the side of her mountain, just like I'm still wandering lost in my battlefield.

Guilt had teeth and it ate folks up if they didn't know how to tame it

I'm sorry about what happened, ' Love said. Death squeezed his hand. 'Play as yourself. Not as me. Trust me one that.

Only the guilty and the lovers really fear. The first because of what they are, the second for what they might lose.

You seem to be holding up rather well under the burden of the world's troubles. How do you do it?

What do you feel like you SHOULD be doing instead of writing? IF you have an answer, then you have guilt. The "should" of life are always linked to guilt.

One of the big lies with sin is that we are already waist-deep and might as well just plunge in.

What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire.

I can turn every "is" into "ought ".

We get used to living in a state of mild disappointment with ourselves.

Don't accuse others of your past, hidden guilt and sins." ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You