psychological guilt Quotes

We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.

The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

Guilt is a Jewish invention improved upon by Christians for the last two thousand years.

Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.

People who are prone to guilt tend to work harder and perform better than people who are not guilt-prone, and are perceived to be more capable leaders.

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.

Judgment is guilt wearing a moral mask to disguise its pain.

Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.

That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.

No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.