Shame Quotes

At the exact time that our society embraces shaming, blaming, judgment, and rejection, it also holds acceptance and belonging as immensely important. In other words, it's never been more impossible to 'fit in,' yet 'fitting in' has never been more important and valued

~ Brené Brown

Love is not the answer, peace is. Throughout my whole life I have experienced and seen others use love as a reason to treat people with unkindness by being controlling, jealous, shouting in anger, and projecting guilt and shame. If you love someone but there is not peace in your heart when you think of that person then your work is not done. Do not stop at love, continue all the way towards the freedom of inner peace. Love starts when peace begins. Without peace love is simply a mask for our insecurity, judgment, and egoic attachments.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

Ensure that your fame doesn't bring you shame.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn't last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they're all still around. I'm ashamed of myself.

~ Michael Chabon

You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

~ Raymond Carver

Every child that receives life advice should keep in mind that in every parent’s past, there’s leftover booze and contraceptives.

~ Bauvard

The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.

~ Donna Tartt

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.

~ Jenny Lawson

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

~ Katherine Paterson

Life is full of challenges. In the end, it's getting up that pulls us through the dark days. So we can admire the sunset.

~ Azelene Williams

Life is full of challenges. In the end it's getting up that pulls us through the dark day's. So that we can admire the sunset

~ Azelene Williams

Some of the worst places I've ever lived in were fear, pain, and shame. The cost of living was so high, your only choice was a slow death.

~ Karishma Magvani

We may believe that anxiety and fear don't concern us because we avoid experiencing them. We may keep the scope of our lives narrow and familiar, opting for sameness and safety. We may not even know that we are scared of success, failure, rejection, criticism, conflict, competition, intimacy, or adventure, because we rarely test the limits of our competence and creativity. We avoid anxiety by avoiding risk and change. Our challenge: To be willing to become more anxious, via embracing new situations and stepping more fully into our lives.

~ Harriet Lerner

It is easy to see how quickly expectations become layered, competitive and conflicting. This is how the shame web works. We have very few realistic options that allow us to meet any of these expectations. Most of the options that we do have feel like a double bind. When Marilyn Frye describes a double bind as a situation in which options are very limited and all of them expose us to penalty, censure or deprivation.

~ Brené Brown

My love, you are driving the entire world mad. The nightingales are committing suicide one by one out of jealousy of your voice. The roses took one glance at your beauty and folded themselves from shame. The trees now only whisper your name and the sky hasn’t stopped crying since you looked up. Have pity on us, my love. We have already broken all the mirrors and glass out of fear that you will forget us and fall in love with yourself once you see what we all cannot stop seeing.

~ Kamand Kojouri

In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm’s length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I didn't need his criticism. I carried enough guilt on my own. I had done everything wrong. I had the highest marks in school but couldn't master common sense.

~ Ruta Sepetys

The only shame is the sin.

~ Aphra Behn

Why, Andrew, why would it irritate me? Do you think that being loved by you is something to be ashamed of? I don't.

~ Andrew Ashling

A person whom writes begins by putting down what they know about loneliness, shame, love, and heartache. In writing fully, they discover many other aspects of themselves that they never suspected including doubts, beliefs, ironies, and farcicalities.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If you can do nothing else, do whatever is in your power to make the people in your life feel completely unashamed of who they are.

~ Sam Killermann

Visionless people are prone to harm and trouble, because they always follow any path and end anyhow.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

It is a shame that most people jump to simple condemnation before considering working towards salvation.

~ Isabella Poretsis

Unlike the world that points out your flaws to ridicule you, when GOD points out your flaws, it's because He want to walk you out of it.

~ Temitope Ibrahim

They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

~ Tim O'brien

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.Must hearts forever sufferfrom ignorance and greed?Can bombs heal our soulsor set our spirits free?

~ Aberjhani

Shame on the misguided, the blinded, the distracted and the divided. Shame. You have allowed deceptive men to corrupt and desensitize your hearts and minds to unethically fuel their greed.

~ Suzy Kassem

For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.

~ Nel Noddings

Among the Kimbrii the greatest shame a person can bring to himself or his clan is to start a war, but the second greatest is to submit to tyranny or injustice without a fight.

~ Aleksandra Layland

Shame is embarrassment multiplied against itself until it dies under it’s own weight and we with it. Forgiveness is freedom multiplied against the Cross until it flies under it’s own liberation and we with it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

~ Jon Ronson

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

When shame is met with compassion and not received as confirmation of our guilt, we can begin to see how slant a lens it has had us looking through. That awareness lets us step back far enough to see that if we can let it go, we will see ourselves as clean where we once thought we were dirty. We will remember our innocence. We will see how our shame supported a system in which the perpetrators were protected and we bore the brunt of their offense — first in its actuality, then again in carrying their shame for it.If the method we chose to try to beat out shame was perfectionism, we can relax now, shake the burden off our shoulders, and give ourselves a chance to loosen up and make some errors. Hallelujah! Our freedom will not come from tireless effort and getting it all exactly right.

~ Maureen Brady

We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Passing their toilet training is the very last thing that some adults did that has made their parents proud of them.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is).

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You cannot really shame a man who sincerely does not care what others think of him.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]?

~ Christine De Pizan

[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.

~ Héloïse D'argenteuil