Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion

Changes in Relationship with others:It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be...

A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.

To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be...

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis … [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother’s Day card. There was a horrible,...

It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt.”We stay in the silence and the loneliness of the otherwise empty dormitory for a few more minutes,...

But, the thing about guilt is, no one can take away for you; you have to unpack it yourself.

It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the...

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in...

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

Confession is for the confessor. It makes you feel good; it ruins the lives of everyone else. It’s a selfish thing to do. Don’t confess.

The worst part about clones is you could be both innocent and guilty at the same time. I didn’t do it—but I did, in the form of my clone.

Guilt is a useless feeling. It’s never enough to make you change direction–only enough to make you useless.

I find that people… very few people think that what they’re doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they’re doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.

Holding one’s self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the...

I have a very hard time getting to rage. I always assume that maybe I’ve done something wrong and then forgotten about it.

Everyone makes mistakes, Jenna. Everyone has regrets and guilt for things they should have done differently in their lives. Shit happens, and we do the best we can at the time. You can’t blame yourself...

The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through...

The Gospel declares that our guilt has been atoned for, the law has been fulfilled. So we don’t need to live under the burden of trying to appease the judgment we feel.

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...

When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that moment and in all the moments after: his brother’s murderer.

My hands are of your colour; but I shame To wear a heart so white.

We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma...

… it isn’t really guilt that is important – it’s innocence. … Some people may go through a lifetime crushed by the weight of a suspicion that is really unjustified.” – Sir Henry Clithering, The...

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one...

It has always seemed that a fear of judgment is the mark of guilt and the burden of insecurity.

My stomach hurts, but if it’s guilt or impacted stool, I can’t tell. Either way, I’m so full of shit.

Sometimes I doubt that anyone with a philosophical turn of mind is fit to judge anyone. He never comprehends the concept of guilt.

Dread was always with her, an alarm system in her head, alertto her next disaster.Despite being resigned to a life of misfortune, she becameresourceful.She grudgingly noticed that things always worked out, evenwhen she claimed defeat.An...

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...

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.

….you can overcome sadness, loneliness, even terrible loss. But guilt goes with you the grave.

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...

More accurately, on the bed and on the table lay various pieces of what had once been a body.Holmes was leaning with his back against the wall, his countenance deathly white. “The door was open,”...

The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It’s not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven’t turned into monsters ourselves–survivor’s guilt, that’s called....

Only afterward did the guilt set in–the guilt that for a few minutes he let himself stop feeling guilty.

Christian consciousness experiences itself in a curious sense as LIBERATED TO FAIL, without intolerable damage to self-esteem and without any reduction of moral seriousness. We are free to be inadequate, free to foul things up,...

When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.

Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.

If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

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.

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are...

You see, sex for Jews is not such a terrible sin. It’s just one more physical sport we’re gonna stink at.

Guilt can teach us to become better; shame causes us to become bitter.” EL

morbid.

Regret piles up around us like books we have never read.

Tragische Schuld verkörpert sich im permanenten Konflikt zwischen der uralten religiösen Vorstellung von der Missetat als einer Beschmutzung, die einer ganzen Rasse anhaftet und unausweichlich von einer Generation auf die nächste vererbt wird […], und...

My needs were covered by layer upon layer of denial. I was scrambling for reasons. But the truth was, even if he had had a successful career, I would have used it as an excuse...