Guilty Sense Quotes & Sayings

I plead guilty to that when I was young pastor. In one of my churches I changed so much, one old wag said I'd changed everything in the church except the signs on the bathroom doors! I could have used a little more wisdom. And common sense. — Jerry Vines

When people get in your face and say, 'This will pass,' you think, 'Are they crazy? I'm never gonna feel any better than I feel right this minute and nothing's ever gonna make sense again.' You see a lot of people play this blame game. Blame, blame, blame. You know? And it's a really easy thing to do, and I'm certainly guilty of it. [You have to] look at yourself and go, 'What part of this do I need to own? Which part of this is my responsibility?' And that's the painful work that you have to go through to hopefully get some real life knowledge out of it. — Reese Witherspoon

She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can't seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who they really are- impostors with limited skills or abilities. — Sheryl Sandberg

In a world that has lost a sense of sin, one sin remains: Thou shalt not make people feel guilty (except, of course, about making people feel guilty). In other words, the only sin today is to call something a sin. — Christopher West

Today's self is restlessly bent on reinvention mainly in order to get rid of a nagging sense of guilt that creates tremendous anxiety despite its unknown origins. The implication of his essay is that when people know why they feel guilty and are able to find an answer to it, they actually become more stable in their identity.15 — Michael S. Horton

The existence of guilty sense is so
important in education and religion. — Toba Beta

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted. — Marquis De Sade

May the Virgin Mary free us from those marks and put an end forever to our sense of guilt. We feel guilty when we go out to work because we're leaving our children in order to earn money to feed them. We feel guilty when we stay at home because it seems we're not making the most of our freedom. We feel guilty about everything, because we have always been kept far from decision making and from power. — Paulo Coelho

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush ... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face. — Charles Darwin

But when we make choices that are different than what our friends are doing, it might seem to them that we are questioning their choices - even if it has nothing to do with them ... And what is the sense in feeling guilty about making different choices than our mothers and the other women before us? Our mothers did the best they could with what they had available to them. Our choices, if different from theirs, are not a denouncement of theirs. — Jennetta Billhimer

I come now to another part of your letter, which is the orthography, if I may call bad spelling orthography. You spell induce, enduce; and grandeur, you spell grandure; two faults, of which few of my house-maids would have been guilty. I must tell you, that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w. — Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

A city built upon mud;
A culture built upon profit;
Free speech nipped in the bud,
The minority always guilty.
Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?
...
Her mountains are still blue, her rivers flow
Bubbling over the boulders.
She is both a bore and a bitch;
Better close the horizon,
Send her no more fantasy, no more longings which
Are under a fatal tariff.
For common sense is the vogue
And she gives her children neither sense nor money
Who slouch around the world with a gesture and a brogue
And a faggot of useless memories. — Louis MacNeice

Dear Procrastinator: Taking action in and of itself is not difficult, but is in fact satisfying and is usually followed by a sense of pride & accomplishment. However, it is THINKING about the action that you should be taking and NOT taking it that's difficult, as it leaves you feeling guilty and unsatisfied. THE SOLUTION: Stop thinking and take action NOW. — Hal Elrod

As long as he owns your tools he owns your job, and if he owns your job he is the master of your fate. You are in no sense a free man. You are subject to his interest and to his will. He decides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he decides whether you shall live or die. And in that humiliating position any one who tries to persuade you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting your intelligence. — Eugene V. Debs

According to the biblical tradition the absence of work
idleness
was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men
the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will. — Leo Tolstoy

It was the look on her face when she said it. And how much she meant it. It suddenly made everything seem like it really was. I felt terrible. Just terrible. — Stephen Chbosky

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged. — W. H. Auden

Where are you going?" I asked,feeling guilty for not being able to hang out with him.
"To find a faerie to kill me,of course." He winked at us,then pretended to fall straight through when the faerie door opened. Even Arianna laughed as the door closed behind him.
"Where did you find that one?"
"I have no idea.I'm a magnet for crazies, I guess."
"They must be able to sense a kindred spirit."
"You're one to talk.Don't you have more hordes of the undead to lead in a glorious revolution? — Kiersten White

You do not his will, and so you cannot understand him; you do not know him, that is why you cannot trust in him. You think your common sense enough to let you know what he means? Your common sense ought to be enough to know itself unequal to the task. It is the heart of the child that alone can understand the Father. Would you have me think you guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost - that you understand Jesus Christ and yet will not obey him? That were too dreadful. I believe you do not understand him. No man can do yet what he tells him aright - but are you trying? Obedience is not perfection, but trying. — George MacDonald

Please do as I requested, only if you can do so with the joy of a little child feeding a hungry duck. Please do not do as I request if there is any taint of fear of punishment if you don't. Please do not do as I request to buy my love, that, is hoping that I will love you more if you do. Please do not do as I request if you will feel guilty if you don't. Please do not do as I request if you will feel shameful. And certainly do not do as I request out of any sense of duty or obligation. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

One song, one note that heals the guilty chaos of our days, making sense of our loneliness, our perjured feelings, our sickness and our poverty, how we shall never be beautiful, how our heads will run over with unbearable secrets and how we are sentenced to this, serving us right
when the song should end, be cut down, finished, and the singer not go on singing. — Spencer Gordon

No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties. — Paul Goodman

We cannot assume the injustice of any actions which only create offense, and especially as regards religion and morals. He who utters or does anything to wound the conscience and moral sense of others, may indeed act immorally; but, so long as he is not guilty of being importunate, he violates no right. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. — Alan Moore

To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth - because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a "good war," and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat. The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past. — Adam Kirsch

Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and all my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. [p. 128] — Dani Shapiro

But let's consider this more carefully. Most of these gifts remain unopened or have been used only once. Admit it. They simply don't suit your taste. The true purpose of a present is to be received. Presents are not "things" but a means for conveying someone's feelings. When viewed from this perspective, you don't need to feel guilty for parting with a gift. Just thank it for the joy it gave you when you first received it. Of course, it would be ideal if you could use it with joy. But surely the person who gave it to you doesn't want you to use it out of a sense of obligation, or to put it away without using it, only to feel guilty every time you see it. When you discard or donate it, you do so for the sake of the giver, too. — Marie Kondo

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life. — Billy Collins

You experience two kinds of guilt. One is the reality of your culpability before God. You have transgressed his law - you are guilty. The other is the sense of your corruption. You feel guilty. The first kind of guilt is true of you because everyone is a sinner. But not everyone knows the second kind. Until a person knows his guilt, he cannot know pardon. Until you feel the bondage of your guilt, you cannot find the freedom of forgiveness. In this sense, guilt is not your enemy. — Joe Thorn

Miss Grantham's sense of humour got the better of her at this point, and, tottering towards a chair, she sank into it, exclaiming in tragic accents:'Oh Heavens! I am betrayed!' His lordship blenched; both he and miss Laxton regarded her with guilty dismay. Miss Grantham buried her face in her handkerchief, and uttered one shattering word: 'Wretch! — Georgette Heyer

I set my glass down and met his eyes, feeling an overwhelming surge of affection for this man. "That ... makes sense," I said, searching for the right words. "I don't think I appreciated what it meant to see you ever day, either. Even if I did want to poison you on no less than twenty-seven separate occasions."
"Ditto," he replied with a smirk. "And sometimes I feel guilty for how many times I threw you out the window in my fantasies. But I most certainly plan on making it up to you. — Christina Lauren

Guilty consciences are apt to take good providences in a bad sense, — Matthew Henry

Absently, she brushed back some of the hair from her face, and she saw as Jaguar's eyes followed how the long strands slid across her throat. Though his dark skin did not show pallor as clearly as Lord Daryl's had, Turquoise could tell Jaguar had not fed yet, and she recognized the hungry look in his black eyes.
Testing, she stood, the movement appearing reluctant. "I"ll leave you to your work if you'd like."
He answered the way she had expected him to. Not raising his gaze from her throat, he said, "Come here." Though the words were an order, the tone left room for argument.
For a moment, Turquoise almost felt guilty. She was intentionally manipulating him. A feeding vampire is an easy target; most of them completely lost sense of their surroundings as they drew blood. Jaguar did not even try to catch her mind as his lips fell to her throat. If she had been armed, it would have been revoltingly easy to kill him. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly. — Jessica Mitford

The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.
Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one. — James Robertson

The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [ ... ]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [ ... ]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one. — James Hillman

Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised — William Wordsworth

Don't feel guilty for saying no to your anyone, It is important for them to hear no from time to time so that they develop a sense of self-control. — Auliq Ice

Others drink for sterility and commit murder on the human not yet sown. Some when they sense that they have conceived by sin, consider the poisons for abortion, and frequently die themselves along with it, and go to Hell guilty of three crimes: murdering themselves, committing adultery against Christ, and murder against their unborn child. — St. Jerome

Second, not only does the gospel prepare me to face my sin, it also frees me up to do so. Facing our sin causes us to feel guilty. Of course we feel guilty because we are guilty. And if I believe, consciously or unconsciously, that God still counts my guilt against me, my instinctive sense of self-protection forbids me to acknowledge my sin and guilt, or, at the least, I seek to minimize it. But we cannot begin to deal with a particular manifestation of sin, such as anger or self-pity, until we first openly acknowledge its presence and activity in our lives. So I need the assurance that my sin is forgiven before I can even acknowledge it, let alone begin to deal with it. By — Jerry Bridges

There isno feeling sadder or more hopeless than the coolingof a friendship between two men. Between a man anda woman a delicate web of terms and conditions is always negotiated. Between men, on the other hand, the deep sense of friendship rests on its selflessness: we expect no sacrifices, no tenderness from each other, all we want is to preserve a pact wordlessly made between us. Perhaps I was really the guilty one, because I did not know you well — Sandor Marai

Admittedly, guilt can be my default setting. After a social gathering, I'm often left with a vague sense of wrongdoing that I try to pinpoint the source of. Had I laughed insensitively or slighted someone unintentionally? And I always feel accused in Nordstrom. The saleswomen look at my jeans and inexpensive haircut and I'm sure they're thinking I'm about to slip a pair of earrings into my purse. I feel guilty when I eat white bread and when I don't recycle. — Deb Caletti

If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate. Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt. And this is true of all men- whether they be white or black -it is a peculiar and powerful, but common need. — Richard Wright

Christian consciousness experiences itself in a curious sense as LIBERATED TO FAIL, without intolerable damage to self-esteem and without any reduction of moral seriousness. We are free to be inadequate, free to foul things up, and yet affirm ourselves in a more basic sense than the secular moralist or humanistic idealist (who can affirm themselves only on the basis of merits and accomplishments. We are free to choose and deny finite values, free to take constructive guilt upon us and to see it as an inevitable and providentially given aspect of our fallen human condition.
All that we have said leads us to the pinnacle of this good news: In Jesus Christ we need no longer be guilty before God. It is only before our clay-footed gods that we stand guilty! — Thomas C. Oden

I suppose, yes, I've been guilty of provocation but it's also just common sense marketing - put a bottle of scent in a woman's cleavage, or between her thighs - and men will notice. — Tom Ford

It is very easy to say that your opponents have been guilty of a breach of faith, but it is a great mistake to splash the paint about so freely that your words cease to have any real meaning and cease to carry any sense of affront even to those to whom they are applied and cease to bear any connection with any genuine feeling of indignation on the part of those on whose behalf they are spoken. — Winston Churchill

He did not feel guilty. He did not feel. The rock was a solidification of his feeling, his conscience, his sense of reality, his self-knowledge. — Nathanael West

To this day, I have a very unhealthy relationship with food. I have an eating disorder; not in that I am anorexic or bulimic - I'm not - but in the sense that I feel extremely guilty every time I eat anything that isn't water. Of course I have body issues. — Anneli Rufus

Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed - a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems - the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoil the child's natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder makes the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the 'comic' magazines.

But the antidote to the 'comic' magazine poison can be found in any library or good bookstore. The parent who does not acquire that antidote for his child is guilty of criminal negligence. — Sterling North

In the silence punctuated only by their footsteps, both men thought not of themselves but of a Man who once made a long,lonely march up a hill, who in the world's worst hour did the most courageous thing ever done.
At the end of His climb,He spread out His arms and permitted guilty men to drive nails into His hands and feet. He endured untold agony to give undeserving men- like Mike Hollis, Derrick Freeman, Nathan Hayes, and Adam Mitchell- a second chance.
To most people none of this - not what these men were doing now, nor what He did two thousand years ago-made sense.
From the outside, grace and truth,honor and courage,seldom do. — Randy Alcorn

(James Joyce, in conversation with Carl Jung"Literary artists know more about the human mind than you fellers have a hope in hell of knowing. Ha. My craft is ebbing. I am yung and easily freudened. One of these days I'll show the lot of you what the unconscious mind is really like. I don't need any of you. In a sense I am Freud."
Jung looked gloomily guilty at the name. "Yes?"
"What's Freud in English?"
"Joy."
"Joy and Joyce. There's little enough difference. Except that I add C and E for Creative Endeavour. I spit in all your eyes. — Anthony Burgess

When looking at Germans, I have never felt a sense that they are guilty. I have encountered anti-Semitism in the United States as well. — Peter Eisenman

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel. — William Landay

Here is the kind of thought pattern that runs through the mind of the child in the alcoholic family system: "If I feel guilty, then I am responsible. And if I am responsible, then I can do something to fix it, to change it, to make it different." Giving up your guilt also means giving up your sense that you have control over the situation. And, of course, loss of control is a disaster. You have grown up to be the perfect doormat for an inconsiderate person. Often you end up in a perfect give-and-take relationship . . . you give, they take. — Janet Geringer Woititz

The individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense; first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges. — Mikhail Bakunin