Shame Quotes

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse — especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage.

~ Karen A. Duncan

It is not the actions of others which trouble us (for those actions are controlled by their governing part), but rather it is our own judgments. Therefore remove those judgments and resolve to let go of your anger, and it will already be gone. How do you let go? By realizing that such actions are not shameful to you.

~ Marcus Aurelius

There she stood, hiding; the mother without child, the voiceless woman full of anger. Her smoked nails hammered her evaporated heart snivelling in the grotty kitchen of disaster. Her face, depleted, cauterised. Her eyes wheezed shame at what she knew would happen to her daughter, again and all over again.

~ Laura Gentile

No one tape her deepest gifts through shame, guilt or anger. In fact, if you come from obligation, others smell the sadness in your blood and they will run the other way

~ Tama Kieves

In yet another paradox, bulimia nervosa serves as both an expression of feelings and a defense against experiencing feelings, particularly shame, anger, loneliness, sadness, envy, and guilt. A person with bulimia nervosa fear, whether consciously or unconsciously, that painful feelings would be unbearable, even annihilating.

~ Sheila M. Reindl

Humility and shame have been confused. Humility is knowing that you know nothing for sure and shame is someone having to tell you.

~ Erica Goros

He who mocked and laughed at correction should blame nobody for his shame and doom.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

I was still searching for someone to blame for my suffering. I really wanted someone to transfer my hate to, so that I could stop hating myself.

~ Glenn Beck

Tricks ripped and you tripped, tricked yourself by falling slowly.I’m the winner in this game,unable to stoop to your level of shame.Unwilling to reply to your words of ache.

~ Coco J. Ginger

This is my real bed-rock objection to the eastern systems. They decry all manly virtue as dangerous and wicked, and they look upon Nature as evil. True enough, everything is evil relatively to Adonai; for all stain is impurity. A bee's swarm is evil — inside one's clothes. Dirt is matter in the wrong place. It is dirt to connect sex with statuary, morals with art.Only Adonai, who is in a sense the True Meaning of everything, cannot defile any idea. This is a hard saying, though true, for nothing of course is dirtier than to try and use Adonai as a fig-leaf for one's shame.To seduce women under the pretense of religion is unutterable foulness; though both adultery and religion are themselves clean. To mix jam and mustard is a messy mistake.

~ Aleister Crowley

Make not, when you work a deed of shame, The scoundrel's plea, 'My forbears did the same.

~ Al-Maʿarri

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

~ David Brooks

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

~ David Brooks

It's shameful for a devil to be good.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Even the oldest trees aren't ashamed to stand naked.

~ Marty Rubin

The fools are always the architect of their fall and trouble.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

Most people, including Ma, preferred to brush unpleasantness away, as if, by sweeping it outside with the dust, it could be forgotten. As if, by acknowledging the existence of something unsavory in their community, they might be tainted by it themselves.

~ Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Don't be ashamed of your ignorance, be ashamed of your unwillingness to overcome it

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

~ Margaret Atwood

Unfortunately we find systems of education today that have departed so far from the plain truth that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bounds imposed by one’s ignorance.To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of this great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.

~ George Spencer-Brown

when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will experience her own (and perhaps others’) dependency as ridiculous, shameful, painful, or denied. - Dependency in the Treatment of complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders 2001Authors: Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis

~ Kathy Steele

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

One of the reasons we judge each other so harshly in this world of parenting is because... we perceive anyone else who's doing anything differently than what we're doing as criticizing our choices.

~ Brené Brown

Caring about the welfare of children and shaming parents are mutually exclusive endeavors.

~ Brené Brown

Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don’t believe your shame.

~ Scott Stabile

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

I am not superior than anybody, don't say i am, else i won't defend you when you get caught.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Don't let out your true behaviour in the public, even if you were born nasty, make others feel you were well bred.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

When I am in a situation where I feel uncomfortable about speaking but it is necessary for me to speak, or if I feel 'put on the spot' my voice sounds strained, really weird, and it feels as if I have no control over how I sound in these situations. Sometimes then my voice is barely audible and I am frequently asked to repeat myself. Attempts at speaking are often embarrassing, shaming experiences for me. I sound quite different when speaking with someone I am more relaxed with, but I don't like the way my voice sounds at the best of times; I was horrified when I heard a recording of myself. Because of this inhibition about speaking, I have never learned to project my voice or to use it effectively. I often feel that I could no more use my vocal cords to break a silence, to get somebody's attention or to initiate an interaction than I could run through fire or do something dangerous in my life.

~ Carl Sutton

Silence by any other name is called shame.

~ 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

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Shame control us and our lives, it makes the choices we just state in spec and watch what's doing... as far as now it goes like a bot... auto!

~ Deyth Banger

Too many men I know experience shame because society places pressure on them to withhold emotion: emotion and sensitivity is weak. I have found the opposite is true: emotion and sensitivity is what makes us strong.

~ Natalie Brenner

The disowned part of self is an energy - an emotion or desire or need, that has been shamed every time it emerged. These energy patterns are repressed but not destroyed. They are alive in our unconscious.

~ John Bradshaw

Anything great will only be appreciated if I am given the opportunity to feel the absence of it, or experience the reversal of it. It is only then that I can even begin to understand its majesty and cherish it in the manner I should have all along.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The pain of humanity's most maltreated victims echoes deep within each of us, in the form of our shame or ignorance.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough - what greater sin is there than that?(Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)

~ Peter S. Beagle

We’re animals. No shame, no guilt - no sin…

~ Heather Mcvea

Not much has changed in the past 6,000 years. We still hide from God because we know we're naked.

~ Ron Brackin