Top 260 Guilt Quotes

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.

If I were ever to grace the pages of ‘Vogue,’ I would want my image retouched because the audience is so vast. There is great vulnerability in being exposed to that many judging eyes. I feel no small amount of guilt over this willingness to surrender my ideals.

Abortion, more than not, leaves women with an aftermath of grief, guilt, and emotional overload. In a lot of cases, this can last a lifetime.

Everyone sees something different in ‘Endgame’: a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth – not about the play, but about the person watching it.

Sadly, we do a much better job of making people feel guilty than we do of delivering them from the guilt we create. We need to confess this and change our ways.

I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I’m not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don’t want to come off egotistical.

My family made it through Hurricane Sandy. We have water, power, and a roof, but the survivor’s guilt makes me want to hide. Sneak away from the brilliance of life. It shouts at me: ‘Don’t enjoy anything too much; people are suffering.’ I feel childlike somehow.

There are absolutely almost perfect people who experience no guilt; they don’t know what it is. They simply do what they need to do – or want to do – next. They see nothing wrong with it. They feel no guilt. They express no guilt. And it’s not even certain what harm they do.

It seems to me that everyone on this planet whom I know or have worked with is suffering from self-hatred and guilt to one degree or another. The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.

I’ve struggled for confidence and had great doubts about myself. But, personally, I’m not riddled with guilt.

I went to an arts high school and was surrounded by drama students who dreamed of working in the industry. I almost feel a sense of guilt, because I didn’t go to acting school.

I don’t have a lot of shame. That doesn’t mean I can’t feel bad about the way someone reacts to me or about something I read about myself online. But I don’t have a lot of guilt, no. I’ve always been this way. I’m missing a chip.

When I feel like I’m not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself. I don’t know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Every time I act on a fear, I feel disappointed in myself. I have a lot of fear. If I can quit all fear in my life and all guilt, then I tend to be much, much more living up to my standards. I’ve never seen a person fail if they didn’t fear failure.

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway.

There’s guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

Motherhood has been an exercise in guilt.

My creativity and my political work are linked. I don’t do this work out of guilt or out of responsibility.

I hope and trust the infinite, the eternal, and merciful and loving God. I worship Him and feel no guilt in my heart before him for what I am going to do.

I have no guilt about any of my pleasures.

I hate when the major event of a show I watch is spoiled for me. And I’m wracked with guilt when/if I spoil something for someone else.

What I have in common with the character in ‘Truman’ is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

I should have worked harder in my life. I suffer from a guilt complex.

We often feel a twinge of guilt over our own fascination with presidential candidates’ wives – as if we are secretly reading the ‘Star’ for our campaign information instead of the policy journals.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

There’s this working-class guilt – you don’t want to be flashy.

Guilt is never very far from Rick Grimes’ shoulder. It comes with the package. He’s a man who takes his responsibilities very heavily, not lightly.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

There are times when you need to pitch a fit and other times when you need to apply Catholic guilt, and it’s just figuring out which is the most appropriate approach and then implementing it.

‘Thank you’ is often an admission that you needed something that wasn’t being fulfilled or you couldn’t do on your own, so you needed someone else. There is also guilt. We think, ‘Well, too much time has gone by, and it doesn’t matter,’ but it does. It always matters.

Good-quality travel and good-quality food are the two luxuries that I never have any guilt indulging in.

I had concluded when I was the prosecutor that I would vote against the death penalty if I were in the legislature but that I could ask for it when I was satisfied as to guilt.

There’s been times I’ve been paralyzed by guilt when I’ve had to work crazy hours or miss a parent-teacher interview.

One might expect that the families of murder victims would be showered with sympathy and support, embraced by their communities. But in reality they are far more likely to feel isolated, fearful, and ashamed, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, angry at the criminal-justice system, and shunned by their old friends.

There’s no regret. You can’t regret. I mean, I’ve felt regret but I’ve also refused to allow regret to sow a seed and live in me because I don’t believe it. You feel it, it’s like guilt, it’s like jealousy, it’s like all those horrible things. You’ve just got to snip them and get them out, because they’re no good.

I think sci-fi films have become rather bleak, and understandably so – I think we’ve made some big mistakes globally with how we’re developing, and we deal with that guilt by creating these very dystopian futures in films.

I was brought up a Catholic, so I take no pleasure in guilt.

I guess secrets are part of the fabric of everybody’s lives. I mean everybody’s lives, and guilt is part of the fabric of everybody’s lives.

I would get fit after having each of my children but it was always slightly tainted with guilt because I would feel guilty if they were with a nanny or at nursery while I was working out.

I don’t do guilt, but if I were to squint in that direction, it’s probably enjoying simple computer games like Zuma. But I regard such things as part of my hand-eye coordination workout.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

I suppose I arrived at my charitable commitment largely through guilt. I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was to dumb luck.

During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn’t buy a coffee.

The old Greeks dwelt on the tendency of human affairs to drift downwards irresistibly to unhappiness. Guilt – that is, untoward and often involuntary actions – pulls generation after generation heavily as lead down, down, down.

I believe much of our lives is about guilt management.

If you impose morality on people, they will find ways to circumvent their guilt. They will make offerings to temples – or other places of worship – but also continue doing things that make them feel guilty.

All the things I’ve done are about duty and guilt: trying to do your best to better other people’s lives.

It has become increasingly difficult for states or the federal government to apply the death penalty. But why even try? Nothing is accomplished, and while the chances of making a mistake are now diminished – DNA can prove guilt as well as innocence – life in prison is a worthy substitute.

I’m a bit of a worrier, to an extreme. I’ll crack a joke, then worry if I’ve offended someone – even when they’re laughing. I have a guilt complex, always worrying.

I have a fascination with Flight 93. My emotions are mixed: awe, gratitude, fear, heartache, pride – even, in some ways, guilt.

It is the truth of grace and not of the law that brings you true freedom. The truth of the law only binds you. In fact, religious bondage is one of the most crippling bondages with which a person can be encumbered. Religious bondage keeps one in constant fear, guilt, and anxiety.

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.

Hmmm… cooking with wine? I usually drink wine while cooking… I do a good braised short ribs with cabernet, though. We’re big red wine drinkers here. All that research showing that it’s good for you takes the guilt away.

Lie detectors sometimes work because people believe they work, deterring the wrong people from applying for jobs in the first place, or prompting admissions of guilt during interrogations.

It’s great to be recognized when I’m looking for a table at a crowded restaurant, but I still don’t put it to best use. I’m such a lump. I won’t cut the line. It’s my Catholic guilt. I gotta get used to it.

My kids say if there’s any family dinner that doesn’t result in somebody crying, it’s not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It’s like a family tradition.

I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.

We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.

I think I’m great. I mean, I might as well come out and say it. Like most people, I have an ego and I’m in show business, so you have to have kind of a healthy, conflagrated ego to a degree. On the other hand, I’m consumed, like a lot of people, with self-doubt and loathing and guilt.

I come from Chicago and am a child of Irish Catholic parents who were able to wield guilt like a Ginsu knife.

I think there’s a tremendous amount of guilt that goes on between mothers and daughters, no matter how good or bad their relationships are.

One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi’s father.

You will put on a dress of guilt and shoes with broken high ideals.

Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.

The enormous success of 2009’s ‘The Blind Side,’ in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn’t post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race – the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.

I can’t even explain to you how terrible that feels, that I equate dating a woman with punishment, shame, guilt, disappointment, reproach, reprimand, persecution. It’s a nightmare.

Undocumented people get arrested all the time. I get arrested, and it’s front-page news. I feel guilt.

I have a massive guilt thing about money.

I look at the world through a green lens now, but you can’t make yourself crazy. That feeling of green guilt can be really inhibiting. It’s about a changing mind-set, remembering to turn off the water when you are brushing your teeth.

Unlike financial impropriety, which needs to be proven, a charge of sexual loutishness and aggressiveness in and of itself can finish you off. Does the man match the charge? To be the kind of man who would be accused of being so gross is guilt enough.

Our standards for motherhood are so high that many of us harbor intense, secret guilt for every harsh word we speak to our children, every negative thought that enters our minds.

I certainly don’t feel any more super than any of the other people I knew in my working life… Quite the reverse. In fact, guilt is my middle name, and I think anybody who does do that thing with work and children and everything knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Loomis has always felt himself responsible for the fact that he did not stop Michael when he first murdered his sister, and so he’s got that guilt to live with.

I grew up outside of Seattle and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning and guilt. Almost an ‘anti-ambition.’

My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn’t – and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.

I once got a huge, expensive flower arrangement from a person I didn’t like, who sent it out of pure guilt. It had a hideous bird-of-paradise in the middle, and I thought it would never fade and die. I hated it.

In Staten Island, when you have video showing the alleged chokehold used on Eric Garner, why not go to trial and have the officer(s) explain the tape, and then this jury can determine guilt or innocence? The tape should guarantee that there should be a trial.

I look over and Mike’s not there, I hear the drums and know it isn’t Jeff. I guess there is some survivor’s guilt, but I’m happy to be here every day, still doing what I love most.

I began to realize that when people experience the love of God, it casts out their fear and frees them from guilt.

Guilt is feeling bad about what you have done; shame is feeling bad about who you are – all it is, is muddling up things you have done with who you are.

You know, I suffer kind of from survivor’s guilt. It’s like you suffer from success because you feel like – why me? Why am I so special? What makes me so different from the next man and why am I able to achieve these things that this person can’t? Prayer is the only thing that helps me get through it.

I would feel so guilty about lying that I would try to stress myself out and work up a headache so I wouldn’t have the guilt of not having a bit of the symptom.

Guilt is an emotion that is never very far away from Rick Grimes. He’s a man that shoulders the responsibility, and it’s one of the forces that keeps pushing him on.

Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the ’50s about women who discover their love for other women – a lot of these things are not in ‘Carol.’

Guilt. It comes naturally to me as a Jew and a Liberal.

Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt? Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.

I’m easily frightened, and I’ve also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.

Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.

I’m an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

It’s important to remember that the animals are not grieving with us. They’re very accepting. They’re not lying there thinking ‘How could you do this to me? Why aren’t you keeping me going?’ Pets don’t do the human things of guilt and anger and recrimination that we do. They come and go with great acceptance.

Unfortunately, when someone asks me for a favor, I can’t say no. Because of my upbringing – my Catholic guilt – if I don’t do it, it plagues me.

Presumptions of guilt or innocence may sometimes be strengthened or weakened by the place of birth and kind of education and associates a man has grown up with, and good character may at times interpose, and justly save, under suspicion, one who is accused of crime on slight circumstances.

Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.

Life is all about balance, and there are certain times of the year – birthday, anniversary, holidays – that are meant to be enjoyed without guilt. That being said, Thanksgiving is a meal – it’s not a Thanksgiving day, and it’s not a Thanksgiving week.

I don’t think I have any guilt or embarrassment about any of the TV shows I watch. Maybe the fact that the shows I can watch over and over again are cartoons like ‘Bob’s Burgers’ and ‘American Dad’ and ‘Rick & Morty.’

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Where does guilt and punishment lie, and are we not more expressive over remorse or guilt when other people see the badness in us?

I was raised with a sense of duty, obedience and guilt.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

For the Russians, the displacement of the Holocaust is calculated and cynical. It’s not emotional; they don’t care about the Holocaust one way or another. They only care about it insofar as they can use it to manipulate a German sense of guilt.

I wanted to write about women and their work, and about valuing the work we, as women, choose to do. Too many women I knew disparaged their work. Many working mothers thought they ought to be home with their children instead, so they carried around too much guilt to enjoy much job satisfaction.

As parents we all have that underlying guilt about how much time we give to our careers.

I started to admit vulnerabilities and things that I was trying to hide before. Shyness, anxiety, guilt and all those things that I have in me are now quite freely shown.

I live in a puddle of guilt, an ocean of guilt that you want your own time.

December 25th has become guilt and obligation.

Guilt can stop us from taking healthy care of ourselves.

Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

Guilt is a serious appetite killer.

I have no regrets about not having children. I still wait for the pang of guilt, but I have none. I tune into the television show ‘Nanny 911’ occasionally which reminds me how much patience and love it take to be a good parent.

There’s Catholic guilt about things, then there’s the guilt of being the youngest of 10, so when nice things happen to you, you’re not really allowed to enjoy them.

I carry lots of guilt.

Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.

I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.

Sometimes Christians live in a terror of universal obligation: AIDS over here, people to be saved over here, a crushing sense of low-level guilt every day of our lives. Question to ask: Where has God put me right now? I need to say no to a whole bunch of other things because if I don’t say no I can’t say yes to others.

‘Death & the Roses’ came out of ideas about flagellation and guilt and from looking at Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Flagellation of Christ.’

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have – whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need – into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.

We must differentiate between guilt and duty. The soldier on the front, like the common man, who does his duty everywhere, should not be held responsible for the actions of a few who also called themselves Germans.

We weren’t very wealthy, but I had a real working-class guilt about wanting to perform. I felt disdain towards it because of the thought that performers were looking for attention. I did theatre studies for my A levels, but didn’t think a career as a performer was something I could do.

When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don’t really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it’s not fair that others aren’t doing exactly what you’re doing. I do have that.

Is it now a crime for someone falsely accused to be upset about it? Mueller presumes guilt and then refuses to ‘exonerate’ President Trump. This turns our legal system upside down and shows the rule of law is no bar to smearing President Trump.

Guilt by association is part of campaigning.

But I don’t believe in guilt by association.

I am not racked with self-loathing. Some issues of guilt and shame, but I’m a pretty good guy.

We all feel the urge to condemn ourselves out of guilt, to blame others for our misfortunes and to fantasize about total disaster.

We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it’s much cheaper to press that button.

Kids are pretty resilient. You don’t have to be at every volleyball game. We can’t guilt ourselves.

If the guilt of sin is so great that nothing can satisfy it but the blood of Jesus; and the filth of sin is so great that nothing can fetch out the stain thereof but the blood of Jesus, how great, how heinous, how sinful must the evil of sin be.

The ‘Vampire of Ropraz’ claims to be based on a true story, but the name of Rosa’s father matches that of a notable Swiss artist and restorer. The eventual suspect has the overlong teeth and shambling menace of a would-be vampire, but Chessex leaves the real possibility of his guilt an open question.

When you do something that maybe wasn’t the best thing to do at the time, you don’t want to hold onto those feelings of guilt, shame or embarrassment, as much as you’d like to learn from them.

The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow-men; and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.

I never quit. The times when I have quit in the past because I couldn’t face trying harder have stayed with me, and the guilt is not worth it.

I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.

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’s so easy for anyone to deal with their own guilt of being a middle-class white music fan by pointing to other people who they perceive to be richer than them, whiter than them.

Alas! how difficult it is not to betray one’s guilt by one’s looks.

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.

A god implants in mortal guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house.

Remember that you have to be happy to make other people happy. Don’t get weighed down by duty, guilt, and responsibility all the time.

I’m happiest at home hanging out with the kids… Having a family has been my saving grace because I don’t work back to back on anything or I’d drive myself to an early grave with guilt and worry for my family, whom I’d never see.

When we blame all Muslims, all Syrians, or all members of any other group because of the actions of individuals, we fall into the trap of asserting collective guilt. We empower the narrow-minded ideology that we are trying to defeat.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

Rarely do I attach guilt to something pleasant. Life’s too short.

Remember that everything you do in the gym makes a difference in the way you live your life outside of the gym. The brownie tastes better when there’s no guilt for eating it. Your relationships with other people are more satisfying.

A song is about heartbreak – but what are the constituent feelings? What are the aspects? There is anger, there is guilt, there are all these different things. I guess putting those voices into dialogue together just felt real.

I think guilt can be good to a small degree, keep you on the right path.

Words, especially when yelled in anger, can be very damaging to a child’s self-confidence. The child probably already feels bad enough just from seeing the consequences of his or her behavior. Our sons and daughters don’t need more guilt and self-doubt heaped upon their already wounded egos.

In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind.

To have guilt you’ve got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don’t feel the guilt you ought to have. And that’s what The Firebombing is about.

And I know I’m supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books… and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can’t quite muster the guilt anymore.

Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.

One of the characteristics of North American culture is that you can always start again. You can always move forward, cross a border of a state or a city or a county, and move West, most of the time West. You leave behind guilt, past traditions, memories.

The brutal truth is, we’re scarcely ‘educating’ children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we’re doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn’t have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

Guilt is a poisonous illusion. Many languages don’t even have a word for guilt. Sure, we all feel it. But we also get to decide if we’re going to let guilt bring us down or not. Acknowledge the feelings, and then give yourself permission to let them go.

From the moment my dad died, from the moment I found out there was the possibility of his dying, there were many surprises – years after, minutes after. The moments I was okay were as surprising as the ones that I wasn’t. Making it through the eulogy without losing it. And then the guilt I felt about it. Surprise!

Even though I avoid buying clothes that are ‘in fashion’, choosing things I fall in love with and wearing them till they fall apart – and generally going for vintage when it comes to evening wear – I still, like every woman I know, suffer from occasional pangs of ‘clothes guilt’.

A baby comes with such responsibility. Once you become a mother, you always have a guilt trip. You always try to do the best, but you feel you can always be better.

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of ‘The Train Driver’ because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

The Proud Boys are over race. We don’t talk about – we talk about race if you want to talk about it, but we don’t have any guilt. No guilt whatsoever. No cis male guilt, none of that stuff.

There is a fine line between guilt and innocence.

I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

A lot of foreign people say, when asking about eating habits, ‘What is your guilty pleasure?’ I have no guilt. Whatever I do, I enjoy and it’s the point. I think if you start to feel guilty about it, that’s a problem. So, no guilty pleasures. I have pleasure and no guilt at all.

The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year. We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete, and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds.

Working parents bring a certain amount of guilt to their relationship with their children.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

My parents are really well intended, and I think their way of dealing with things is denial and guilt. Nobody wanted to talk about it. But all I did was blame myself.

I am not a religious person, but I am spiritual. But I don’t believe in things like guilt.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

I did a lot of things that I regretted and I certainly paid for my mistakes. You have to go and ask for forgiveness and it wasn’t until I really started doing good and doing right, by other people as well as myself, that I really started to feel that guilt go away. So I don’t have a problem going to sleep at night.

How blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of guilt.

Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.

Frankly, Indian women inherit this collective cultural unconscious – this sense of guilt, shame, and dishonour. I think Indian girls need to become shameless and a little selfish, too.

I’ve always felt a certain guilt to have them labeled as ‘Christina’s sisters’ or, ‘That’s Christina’s mom’ but them looking for the respect to be named Elizabeth and Danielle and Carmen.

No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.

When I was in 4th grade, my mom was diagnosed with oral cancer. It was not looking good, it was serious when they found it. Obviously, I didn’t know much about what was going on. I remember feeling a lot of guilt about it, feeling like I somehow contributed to it. I think that’s just something that kids often do.

Much of the impotence of American churches is tied to a profound ignorance and apathy about justification. Our people live in a fog of guilt. Or just as bad, they think being a better person is all God requires.

You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.

I had a Christian upbringing – it was all about sin and guilt. I was very happy just kissing people. I was like the make-out queen – not even second base.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Skating takes up 70 percent of my time, school about 25 percent. Having fun and talking to my friends, 5 percent. It’s hard. I envy other kids a lot of things, but I get a guilt trip when I’m not training.

Guilt can prevent us from setting the boundaries that would be in our best interests, and in other people’s best interests.

Critics have called alien epic ‘Avatar’ a version of ‘Dances With Wolves’ because it’s about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.

The creation of Spoleto was a social experiment. Because I’ve always suffered guilt from being a Catholic, when I was in my fifties I felt a need of being needed.

Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt.

I’m trying to avoid, you know, guilt, even though before the child is born, you’re already thinking you’re doing things wrong… Why do I think that will probably carry over until the day you die?

Hollywood people are filled with guilt: white guilt, liberal guilt, money guilt. They feel bad that they’re so rich, they feel they don’t work that much for all that money – and they don’t, for the amount of money they make.

Acting is not terribly important work, and I have always felt a bit of guilt about pursuing something that is so selfish. I love doing it, but it is never something that feels like it’s going to change or save the world.

I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

I really believe guilt finds its way out of a person.

Guilt is a weird thing to me. I don’t have a lot of it.

The mere acknowledgment that ‘God is watching’ can act as a trap, fueling bad behavior, corruption, and guilt, all remedied by God’s forgiveness. No personal responsibility is needed – someone on the outside sees whatever we’re doing and makes it all OK.

I don’t have any gnawing guilt over contributing to any unhappiness suffered by my husbands. They were as much to blame as I was.

I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the wrong that you did that caused the guilt feelings.

Canon law itself says for one case of guilt, a priest can be dismissed from the clerical state. One.

We have made drugs an Olympic event. It receives most of the coverage at the Games and even the suspicion of guilt can ruin a reputation for life.

I don’t want to live with the guilt of messing up someone’s retirement fund.

I don’t want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they’re willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, ‘Hey, this is not appropriate.’

When both my parents were unwell I was in that situation that will be very familiar to many women. I had young children in one part of the country, and elderly unwell parents in another. I was in a constant state of guilt. Was I there enough for my mother? Was I there enough for my children?

I’m not sure that Jesuits ever produce faithful Catholics. Because they’re too fierce. It is Sturm und Drang, and it is guilt – it is all that battlefield stuff.

I love soap operas – the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives – Jessica Fletcher, ‘Columbo,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘L.A. Law.’ Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program – a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.

What matters to me is my own estimation, and I’m very tough on myself. I need to be proud of what I’ve done and I work hard for it. I had a very Christian upbringing… lots of guilt. A good thing, It keeps you sane.

There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.

Glory, built on selfish principles, is shame and guilt.

I actually want to hold on to where I came from, and also I want to be at this bar in Brooklyn, even if I’m not drinking at all. What does that tension look like? It’s less an attack on the parents and more an interrogation of personal guilt, personal responsibility. That’s my internal dialogue.

When I fell in love, all the shame and guilt I carried with me for years suddenly vanished.

I don’t feel any remorse or guilt after a fight. I can sympathise with an opponent who is getting a beating, but if it is the choice between him and me, it’s not gonna be me.

What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

An exciting and inspiring future awaits you beyond the noise in your mind, beyond the guilt, doubt, fear, shame, insecurity and heaviness of the past you carry around.

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe.

The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.

I think we all suffer from guilt at some point in our lives, but for the most part, I never really regret, and I try to always remain positive.

The uniqueness of executive clemency lies in the president’s power to act without weighing guilt, innocence and legal principle.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

I had a lot of guilt and shame when I was running from God, but nothing like when I was running for God. I was always looking for God’s approval, and that’s where the guilt and shame came out in a big way.

I’m just going to say it: I’m pro-guilt. Guilt is good. Guilt helps us stay on track because it’s about our behavior. It occurs when we compare something we’ve done – or failed to do – with our personal values.

Catholics have guilt and Jews have guilt, fine. But mothers can trump them all.

I grew up as a Mormon, and that had more of an impact on my values than my beliefs. I’m afraid I will always feel the weight of a lie. I’m very hard on myself anyway. Religious guilt carries over too. You can’t really misbehave without feeling badly about it. At least, I can’t.

A dirty player is somebody who ultimately is trying to hurt somebody. There’s a huge difference. There’s no gray in that. Like, you have no conscience, no nothing, no guilt. I don’t have that mean streak in me. I don’t play angry. It’s not anger.

The innocence that feels no risk and is taught no caution, is more vulnerable than guilt, and oftener assailed.

Having a child is difficult enough already, bringing with it a whole range of wonderful challenges, and we shouldn’t be trying to guilt parents into ‘there is just one way to do it’.

Oust me if you want, but if I stepped down, I would be admitting guilt.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

There is, I think, far too much guilt generally in society around parenthood, about whether or not you breastfeed or whether or not you bottle feed. We know the evidence is very strong in favour of breastfeeding and the benefits of that, but it shouldn’t mean we make people feel bad if they can’t do that for some reason.

We have learned the lines of good taste through history and our sense of guilt, be it post-colonial or post-Holocaust.

If I leave my computer, I’m probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work.

If only I wasn’t an atheist, I could get away with anything. You’d just ask for forgiveness and then you’d be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.

‘,Alive’ stems from emotional growth and contentment. Before writing the song, I was swimming in a pool of hurt, guilt and spiritual discomfort. Instead of drowning, I decided to embrace these feelings and express gratitude for the lessons learned. With this new-found sense of life, I am stronger and happier than ever.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but guilt is simply God’s way of letting you know that you’re having too good a time.

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn’t realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.

I mean, I felt terrible. And in the beginning, I mean, I was completely devastated. I mean, can you imagine the kind of guilt that you would feel, and the responsibility?

The treason of which I stand convicted loses all its guilt, has been sanctified as a duty, and will be ennobled as a sacrifice.

A lot of people are afraid of the idea of enslavement, and that’s because it’s tied to so much shame and guilt… That is the big elephant in the room, but a part of why we’re afraid to attack that subject matter is because of the way we’ve been taught about it.

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty – as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

The guilt of newborns is immense.

If it’s a sunny day, I get this weird guilt if I’m not making the most of it, so I’ll walk or go for a swim or get on my bike, or I’ll go to the Heath, just have a reason to get out.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

Once they are charged, too many poor New Yorkers find themselves trapped by our unjust bail system. Unable to pay for bail, they languish in Rikers Island or other jails while they await trial, regardless of guilt.

Hard though it may be to accept, remember that guilt is sometimes a friendly internal voice reminding you that you’re messing up.

Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups.

My mother should have been Jewish. She could have taught a class on how to induce guilt.

The decision of such judges as Claudius and his Senate is worth very little in the question of a man’s innocence or guilt; but the sentence was that Seneca should be banished to the island of Corsica.

For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.

There’s so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.

Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.

Men and women wonder if merely walking or driving justifies being followed, stopped, or questioned. This practice and the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color must come to an end.

I feel a lot of guilt about the freedom that being an artist provides. I ask myself, ‘Why am I not the guy emptying the trash, why am I the guy who is watching the guy empty the trash?’

It is a hard thing to let go of mistakes we’ve made and sins. God wants us to do that because He knows the guilt and the condemnation will keep us from becoming who He has created us to be.

Maybe it’s because I was named for him, but I’ve always wanted to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s oversimplifying, but all Hawthorne’s short stories and novels are, in one way or another, about guilt. Something profoundly disturbing must have happened to him at an early age. I’d like to know what that was.

Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

Many, many people – many parents feel that their decisions are, maybe not, great decisions. Every parent has that, you know, parent guilt of my goal is to produce wonderful, productive individuals and put them out into society.