I was tormented with guilt for years and years. In fact, it was so bad that if I didn’t feel wrong, I didn’t feel right!

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

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

I believe many people feel like God is mad at them.

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.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It’s so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you’re also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it’s just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.

When we played softball, I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back.

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.

He incurs a fearful amount of guilt who in the least promotes the aim of the Evil One by trampling upon a tender conscience in a child.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

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.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn’t eat or sleep.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

Female psychotic bosses can be particularly devilish. They will tend to mix in a lot of passive aggression, making you feel guilty for all kinds of things.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

Some Christians feel guilty when they are doing something that isn’t ‚spiritual.‘ Somehow or another, they feel the need to hurry through the grocery store, dash through the house cleaning, and rush through all the daily aspects of life that seem irrelevant to their faith.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

I refuse to feel guilty. I feel guilty about too much in my life but not about money. I went through periods when I had nothing, so somebody in my family has to get stinkin‘ wealthy.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

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.

It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies.

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

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

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

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.

I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

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

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.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

I never sympathise with the accused unless there’s a chance the accused is not guilty, but I certainly don’t ever sympathise with the criminal.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.