Guilt Quotes

Guilt is often an appropriate response to wrongdoing, but punishment impedes the development of a conscience by taking away the opportunity for him to feel guilty. He has no chance to develop inner motivation.

Nancy Samalin, Loving Your Child

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. There is no greater guilt than discontentment. And there is not greater disaster than greed.

LaoTzu

The very presence of guilt, let alone its tenacity, implies imbalance: Something, we suspect, is getting more of our energy than warrants, at the expense of something else, we suspect, that deserves more of our energy than we

Melinda M. Marshall, Good Enough

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

Simone de Beauvoir

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 moving masks.

Oscar Wilde

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Aldous Huxley

He who is present at a wrongdoing and does not lift a hand to prevent it, is as guilty as the wrongdoers.

American Indian Proverb, Omaha

He that is conscious of guilt cannot bear the innocence of others: So they will try to reduce all others to their own level.

Charles James Fox

Guilt is to danger, what fire is to gunpowder; a man need not fear to walk among many barrels of powder, if he have no fire about him.

John Flavel

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

William Shakespeare

The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer.

Albert Ellis

If you commit a crime, you're guilty.

Rush Limbaugh

Forbear to lay the guilt of a few on the many.

Ovid

It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer.

William Blackstone, 'Commentarie

Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.

Bishop Robert South

Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil

Mark Twain

Whoever blushes confesses guilt, true innocence never feels shame.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

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 self-hatred.

Christopher Hitchens

The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.

Victor Hugo