Guilt Quotes

The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

Khaled Hosseini

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

Marilynne Robinson

There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another because he is angered in thoughtlessness; then, one man is tolerant because he was given the flag of peace, another because he is cowardly and wishes to hide all guilt.

Criss Jami

Any yes given out of fear, shame, guilt, or insecurity should be a no.

Saundra Dalton-Smith

The opening screen of T'Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.

Neal Stephenson

I felt ashamed now that I tried to take my life.It is such a precious thing.I had no one to talk me out of my despair,and that was a mistake.You need to keep people close.You need to give them access to your heart.

Mitch Albom

Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.

John Ruskin

The price that one pays for refusing to act on the truth as one sees it, is to be led to believe untruth to avoid guilt.

Kenneth L. Pike

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

Leo Tolstoy

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

Holly Black

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

Albert Camus

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.

C.S. Lewis

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

Lillian Hellman, The Watch on th

I would forget it fain,But oh, it presses to my memory,Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners' minds.*I would be glad to forget about it, but it weighs on my memory like sins linger in guilty minds.*

William Shakespeare

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

Albert Einstein

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.

Christopher Hitchens

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear each bush an officer.

William Shakespeare

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Voltaire

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Victor Hugo, Les Mis