Guilt Quotes

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.

~ Albert Camus

It is through justification of one's actions that a completely guiltless life is possible.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.

~ Ayn Rand

Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.

~ Lynette Gould

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.

~ Thomas De Quincey

All of us have a shadow man dogging our steps that we cannot shake, no matter how hard we try. He reminds us at our best that we are not as good as we appear to be; he bites at our heel with guilt when we find ourselves behaving far beneath our own expectations. That is the human condition. That is why we yearn so for redemption.

~ Pamela Kay Hawkins

Look innocent. Have hope.” “Okay.” “And remember…” “What?” “Even O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

~ Kenneth Eade

Guilt is a lazy feeling that takes no action, the wings of integrity are the only thing that sets it free.

~ Shannon L. Alder

She made him feel guilty at times. The problem was that she was so honest herself, almost transparent. It seemed criminal to be deceiving her.

~ Emily Arden

What has to do with your ability to fall asleep is not caffeine. It’s having a clean conscience. I have a clean conscience so I can drink all the caffeine I want.

~ Bob Barr

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.

~ Carla H. Krueger

I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six.

~ Erin Merryn

I feel guilty when I feed them unhealthy food they like. I feel guilty when I feed them healthy food they don’t like. I feel guilty when I drop them off at school. I feel guilty when I pick them up at school. I feel guilty mostly for writing this book instead of spending time with them.

~ Jim Gaffigan

Indeed, to this day, I think if you blame everything on the government, you're not just wrong, you're being reckless. It's as silly as blaming everything on the Freemasons, or the Illuminati, or insert-bad-guy-here. But I do believe that someone must ask the hard questions, especially of our elected officials as well as powerful men who become members of so-called secret societies. Remember: Governments don't lie. People lie. And if you want the real story, you need to find out more about those people.

~ Brad Meltzer

The reality is, no matter what you were told, whatever happened to you as a child was not legally or morally your fault. Abused children are instilled with guilt regarding their participation. It's an especially complex issue if the abuser is a family member. The child is told and believes that by his word his family will disintegrate, or harm may descend upon other loved ones. He fears he will lose more by telling than not.

~ Sarah E. Olson

Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves.

~ Lloyd Jones

There was no echo, no reverberation. If anything the room ate sound. It swallowed her voice, her words, and her eternal, inadequate apology. But not her memories. She would never be rid of those.

~ Laini Taylor

Like hatred, guilt can’t be locked in the silence of forgetting, without taking part of your soul with it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

So I let my shame own me, kill me, wilt me away into a thousand dead flakes, knowing if I kept it all in, she would never have to learn the dirtiness that was forever inside me--the bad, the ugly, the twisted. She could go on living her life happy, just like she deserved.

~ Jessica Sorensen

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to pass as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He had just compunction enough for having done nothing for his sisters himself, to be exceedingly anxious that everybody else should do a great deal.

~ Jane Austen

All along, I was less concerned about walking a path of integrity and more caught up in a compass calibrated by greed. And with a compass such as this, how is it that I’m having a hard time understanding why I am where I am?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

On our Journey, we should not dwell on the guilt emerging because of dropping back to Ego-dominated state; instead, we should celebrate that we are in the state of the Presence!

~ Frank Wanderer

I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.

~ Holly Black

With every rise in choices, the expectations double up which puts people deeper down into the rubble.

~ Ashish Patel

...Except when I was alone. I'd hate myself. It's how we feel about ourselves when we're alone that must guide our decisions.

~ Tom Rob Smith

People who own their lives do not feel guilty when they make choices about where they are going. They take other people into consideration, but when they make choices for the wishes of others, they are choosing out of love, not guilt; to advance a good, not to avoid a bad.

~ Henry Cloud

You should never have a relationship based on guilt over someone's poor choices.

~ Bryant Mcgill

But when we make choices that are different than what our friends are doing, it might seem to them that we are questioning their choices - even if it has nothing to do with them.... And what is the sense in feeling guilty about making different choices than our mothers and the other women before us? Our mothers did the best they could with what they had available to them. Our choices, if different from theirs, are not a denouncement of theirs.

~ Jennetta Billhimer

Men like that — when they know they won’t be found out — they will do anything.

~ Michelle Paver

Worry is perhaps the most useless emotion, it is the product of guilt after the time for action has passed.

~ Charbel Tadros

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.

~ Robert C. Solomon

In this sense every serious choice has a tragicomic dimension. For it is impossible to be a human being without choosing, and it is impossible to choose without value denials, and it is impossible to deny values without guilt. That is a very simple though, but it forms the core definition of guilt: an awareness of significant value loss for which I know myself to be responsible. Guilt is the self-knowing of moral loss.

~ Thomas C. Oden

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

~ Voltaire

I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.

~ Albert Camus

Well, did he do it?She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant did it or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

~ Michael Connelly

The law does not expect a man to be prepared to defend every act of his life which may be suddenly and without notice alleged against him.

~ John Marshall

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

~ Paul Beatty

I am against justice … whenever it is carried out by a mob.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't feel guilty all the time. Maybe it is more along these lines: We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time.

~ Paul Kalanithi