Shame For Being Human Quotes & Sayings

A pervasive sense of shame is the ongoing premise that one is fundamentally bad, inadequate, defective, unworthy, or not fully valid as a human being. — Merle Fossum

The spurned diagnosis
Shame
"By shame, I have in mind the terrible, at times unfathomable, feeling of being outcast from human society, of being shunned and spurned, of being wanted by no one, and having no one who empathizes with you (Lynd 1958). Part of this experience of shame is the focus on the inadequacies of oneself in the eyes of others and oneself, and of feeling mortified, wanting to disappear, to hide inside a crack in the wall (Lewis 1971). — Elizabeth Howell

Westerners often define spirituality as denying oneself, being detached from earthly concerns, and being intent on otherworldly values. By contrast, the Hebrews experienced the world of spirit as robust, life-affirming, and this-worldly in character. Such was the "spiritual" orientation of the Hebrews. So-called spirituality did not come by negating the richness of life's experiences or withdrawing from the world. Instead, they affirmed creation by finding a sense of holiness in the here and now. There was no division between the sacred and secular areas of life. It was all God's world, and it was to be enjoyed without a sense of shame or guilt. In Paul's words, "to the pure, all things are pure" (Tit. 1:15). As trustees and stewards of God's world, human beings were to live within it and use it in accord with divine directives. — Marvin R. Wilson

These days, shame is emerging from the shadows and beginning to have its own identity. For example, if you talk about guilt to people under thirty, you often get blank stares. But if you talk about "worthless," "failure," or "shame," they feel as if you have deciphered the core of their being. For them, shame is arguably the human problem. If the next generation is talking about it, that's a good sign, in the sense that shame may soon receive the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, you won't hear about it on the national news nor even in many Sunday sermons. It's hard to know how to speak about the unspeakable. You don't mention shameful things in polite conversation. — Edward T. Welch

Toxic shame, the shame that binds us, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that "I am flawed and defective as a human being." Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits; it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self. It is like internal bleeding - exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself. Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful exposure of the perceived failure of self to the self. In toxic shame the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can't be trusted. As an object that can't be trusted, one experiences oneself as untrustworthy. — John Bradshaw

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general ... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star. — Charles Baudelaire

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; o God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, even p things that are not, to q bring to nothing things that are, 29so r that no human being [4] might boast in the presence of God. — Anonymous

I just feel compelled to continue to be transparent. It just really levels the playing field and eradicates the shame that I have, or that one might have, about being human. So I'm going to just keep going. — Alanis Morissette

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny ... it is also her vulnerability. — Susan Sontag

I think happy, companionate marriages between men and women who respect each other (as far as is consistent with being actual human beings) should be every bit as poetry-worthy as angst, bitterness, and shame. — Delia Sherman

I don't care what your excuse is, I don't care what you think God told you to do, if you are in the business of closing children's minds and obliterating their capacity to imagine, and depriving them of a capacity to laugh, then you are a criminal. Maybe not under the law, but under any decent system of morality.
Shame on anyone who brainwashes a child and attacks their individual liberty and deprives them of the freedom that is the very definition of a human being. Shame. — Michael Grant

25For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 26For consider your calling, brothers: m not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, [3] not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27But n God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; o God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, even p things that are not, to q bring to nothing things that are, 29so r that no human being [4] might boast in the presence of God. 30And because of him [5] you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us s wisdom from God, t righteousness and u sanctification and v redemption, 31so that, as it is written, w Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. — Anonymous

A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure, explode with passion ... A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be ... But after that? How many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia? All passion is childish, it's banal and naive, it's nothing we learn, it's instinctive, and so it overwhelms us ... Overturns us ... It bears us away in a flood ... All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe. That is the reason why passion is worth something. Not for what it gives us, but for what it demands that we risk - our dignity, the puzzlement of others in their condescending shaking heads ... — Fredrik Backman

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. — Osamu Dazai

Today I will learn to reject shame. Shame is an overwhelming sense that who I am isn't good enough. I realize that I am good enough, and that my imperfections are part of being human. I let go of shame. — Melody Beattie

Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.
Do it or don't do it.
It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself,. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got. — Steven Pressfield

Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one's highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man's birthright. He tho ... ught that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place. That is what Howard Roark thought of man and of exaltation. — Ayn Rand

Jesus brooks no rivals. There have been, there are, many religious leaders. In an age of postmodern sensibilities and a deep cultural commitment to philosophical pluralism, it is desperately easy to relativize Jesus in countless ways. But there is only one Person of whom it can be said that he made us, and then became one of us; that he is the Lord of glory, and a human being; that he died in ignominy and shame on the odious cross, yet is now seated on the right hand of the Majesty on high, having returned to the glory he shared with the Father before the world began. — D. A. Carson

I've learned so much during my time with cancer. It's taught me a lot about who I am. It revealed to me my true goals and priorities. It introduced me to a brand new world where time isn't wasted, and important things aren't left unsaid. All the while, the superfluities of life are ignored and forgotten. Because I now understand how a person should act, whether confronted by death or not. And it's a shame that's what it takes to scare someone into becoming a conducive, meritable human being. — Kevin Lankes

Authentic love does not devalue another human being. Authentic love does not silence, shame or abuse. If you are in a relationship with someone who does not honor and respect you, I want you to know that you are worthy of love. Please reach out for help. Your voice will save you. Let it extend into the night, let it part the darkness. Let it set you free to know who you truly are - valuable, beautiful, loved. — Brooke Axtell

During school age, the bright, shame-based child will attempt to develop inhuman ego defenses or defending scripts, such as perfectionism, blaming, criticizing, righteousness or being judgmental. The character-disordered try to be more than human. Since being grounded in healthy shame is the permission to be human, the toxically shamed become polarized trying to be more than human or giving up and becoming less than human. — John Bradshaw

Life is messy, Ren. It's not easy and it's definitely not for the timid. Everyone has a past. Things that stab them right between the eyes. Old grudges. Old shame. Regrets that steal your sleep and leave you awake until you fear for your own sanity. Betrayals that make your soul scream so loud you wonder why no one else hears it. In the end, we are all alone in that private hell. But life isn't about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting the past. It's about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes. Yes, people disappoint us all the time. But the harshest lessons come when we disappoint ourselves. When we put our trust and our hearts into the hands of the wrong person and they do us wrong. And while we may hate them for what they did, the one we hate most is ourself for allowing them into our private circle. How could I have been so stupid? How could I let them deceive me? We all go through that. It's humanity's brotherhood of misery. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

J_Doe032692 wrote: I am not a thin person. However this does not give people the right to taunt me, calling me ugly and worthless, telling me to kill myself because no one will ever want me, or to make up songs about why I am so fat and how much food I eat. NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO HURT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING THIS BADLY.
My throat constricts. The neck brace feels as if it's shrinking and cutting off my esophagus. I reach up and cover the words with my hand and the web site dissolves.
I want to go.
Now. — Julie Anne Peters

If you want to make a difference, the next time you see someone being cruel to another human being, take it personally. Take it personally because it is personal! — Brene Brown

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes. — George Soros

Are you unmarried? Do not bewail yourself, as if your life must be incomplete. Yours is not a higher state, as celibacy has falsely taught, but it is neither a failure nor a shame. Cease to measure yourself by human standards. Find rest in being just what your heavenly Father wills you to be. It may be that you have been kept free from the limited circle of a home, in order to pour your love on those who have no one else to love them. — F.B. Meyer

The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we're violated, is shame at being human. — Gregory David Roberts

Love, the beauty of it, the joy of it and yes, even the pain of it, is the most incredible gift to give and to receive as a human being. And we deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise. — Ellen Page

We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach. — Charles Dickens

A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive. — James Weldon Johnson

Reduction is the least observed of the three R's of environmentalism ('reduce, reuse, recycle') but it's probably the most important. Reuse and recycling are sensible measures in an over-productive society, but why not neutralise the problem of overproduction at the source? Instead of choosing to act efficiently at the end of a product's life cycle by reusing or recycling it, we should stop said product from being made in the first place by eliminating consumer demand for it. If the rainforests must be burned and the oceans poisoned to cater for the essentials of human life, then so be it and we'll call it an inevitable pity; but for that to happen in the name of games consoles, cell phones and chocolate fountains is a wanton and avoidable shame. — Robert Wringham

Fathers and Sons
Arkaday watching Katya's face as she accepts his marriage proposal:
Anyone who has never seen such tears in the eyes of a beloved one cannot fathom to what extent, all overcome with gratitude and shame, a human being can be happy on earth.
Bazarov on his death bed:
I am done for. I've fallen under the wheel. And it transpires that there was no point in thinking about the future. It's an old story, is death, but to every man it comes anew. — Ivan Turgenev

And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Where are you, Adam? According to the book of Genesis, Adam went into hiding after the fall. By trying to be more than human, Adam felt less than human. Before the fall, Adam was not ashamed; after the fall he was. Toxic shame is true agony. It is a pain felt from the inside, in the core of our being. It is excruciatingly painful. — John Bradshaw

Being natural and matter-of-fact about nudity prevents your children from developing an attitude of shame or disgust about the human body. If parents are very secretive about their bodies and go to great lengths to prevent their children from ever seeing a buttock or breast, children will wonder what is so unusual, and even alarming, about human nudity. — Lee Salk

There were many reasons why I chose to stay silent about my past for so long, mostly fear and shame. Now im older and wiser.Now I understand that I should never have to live in fear of another human being, and if I do, that's their shame, not mine. — Gabriella Gillespie

I have a lot of
I struggle with a lot of shame over my past. There have been times when I've been incredibly embarrassed about the things that happened to me. I don't think that there is one human being in this world that would wish, you know, to be injured as a kid the way
in ways that I was. — Traci Lords

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! ... The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Rumi — Tara Brach

If our primary caregivers are shame-based, they will act shameless and pass their toxic shame onto us. There is no way to teach self-value if one does not value oneself. Toxic shame is multigenerational. It is passed from one generation to the next. Shame-based people find other shame-based people and get married. As each member of a couple carries the shame from his or her own family system, their marriage will be grounded in their shame-core. The major outcome of this will be a lack of intimacy. It's difficult to let someone get close to you if you feel defective and flawed as a human being. Shame-based couples maintain nonintimacy through poor communication, nonproductive circular fighting, games, manipulation, vying for control, withdrawal, blaming and confluence. Confluence is the agreement never to disagree. Confluence creates pseudointimacy. — John Bradshaw

The cycle begins with the false belief system shared by all addicts: that no one could want them or love them as they are. In fact, addicts can't love themselves. They are an object of scorn to themselves. This deep internalized shame gives rise to distorted thinking. The distorted thinking can be reduced to the belief, "I'll be okay if I drink, eat, have sex, get more money, work harder, etc." The shame turns one into what Kellogg has termed a "human doing," rather than a human being. Worth is measured on the outside, never on the inside. The mental obsession about the specific addictive relationship is the first mood alteration, since thinking takes us out of our emotions. — John Bradshaw

When you hear of Gay Pride, remember, it was not born out of a need to celebrate being gay.
It evolved out of our need as human beings to break free of oppression and to exist without being criminalized, pathologized or persecuted.
Depending on a number of factors, particularly religion, freeing ourselves from gay shame and coming to self-love and acceptance, can not only be an agonising journey, it can take years.
Tragically some don't make it.
Instead of wondering why there isn't a straight pride be grateful you have never needed one.
Celebrate with us. — Anthony Venn-Brown

there isn't shame in having shadows - we all have them to varying degrees. it's simply a part of being human — Timothy Roderick

Have charity; have patience; have mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak
above all, any little child
to shame and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste
never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer
crush what is finest and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature. — Charles Kingsley

Guilt is our morality shame and guards our conscience. It tells us we have transgressed our values. It moves us to take action and change. Shame warns us not to try to be more or less than human. Shame signals our essential limitations. Shame limits our desire for pleasure and our interest and curiosity. We could not really be free without our shame. There is an anonymous saying, "Of all the masks of freedom, discipline (limits) is the hardest to understand." We cannot be truly free without having limits. Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well. — John Bradshaw

NEED SHAME BINDS When these needs are neglected, children are given the message that their needs are not important, and they lose a sense of their own personal value. They are not worth someone being there for them. They get the feeling they do not matter. As their needs are chronically rejected, children stop believing they have the right to depend on anyone. These dependency needs rely on the interpersonal bridge and the bond of mutuality for their fulfillment. The interpersonal bridge is broken when one is abandoned through neglect. Since we have no one to depend on, we come to believe that we have no right to depend on anyone. We feel shame when we feel needy. Since these needs are basic needs, i.e., needs we cannot be fully human without, we have to get them met in abortive ways. — John Bradshaw