Quotes About Guilt❓

Guilt is not meeting the expectations of others, imagined or real.—Jennifer James

During the Under-eating Phase, physical hunger can be turned into spiritual hunger. Many people have long believed that one can only experience a deep spiritual awareness when fasting. This said, I should reiterate the full satisfaction and sense of freedom that you can achieve every day during the Overeating Phase, when you can eat as much as you want with no guilt involved, and will pleasantly calm down. Every day has a happy end.—Ori Hofmekler

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.—Voltaire

For not only must the patient believe in his therapeutic experience, no mater what its ideology or interpretation, he must also believe in general above all in himself as a self reliant individual, different and differentiated from others.  He has to face in this separation process the guilt which he can not deny or pay off, but can only bear and expedite as best he may in actual living.—Otto Rank

Seeking treatment was not easy for me. I was a classic ‘in denial’ addict. As a stay-at-home mom, I drank wine all day, but nothing really seemed to be wrong. One day, my teenager daughter and husband had a mini-intervention with me. I felt so embarrassed and guilty. I think I was drinking because I was lonely and a bit depressed. However, the community I’ve found in recovery and through AA has been incredibly supportive. I’ve regained my happiness and heath.—Stay-at-home Mom

…what I am beginning to suspect is that most guilty people reject the possibility of forgiveness not because it is too good to believe, but because they fear the responsibility forgiveness entails. It's Hell to be guilty, but it's worse to be responsible.—William Slone Coffin

…we must admit that social life, so-called 'worldly life', in its own way promotes this illusory and narcissistic existence to the very limit. The curious state of alienation and confusion of man in modern society is perhaps more 'bearable' because it is lived in common, with a multitude of distraction and escapes—and also with opportunities for fruitful action and genuine Christian self-forgetfulness. But underlying all life is the ground of doubt and self-questioning which sooner or later must bring us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our life. This self-questioning can never be without a certain existential 'dread'—a sense of insecurity, of 'lostness', of exile, of sin. A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one's own inmost Truth. 'Dread' in this sense is not simply a childish fear of retribution, or a naive guilt, a fear of violating taboos. It is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie.—Thomas Merton

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.—Abraham Maslow

Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.—African saying

A philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything other except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.—Bertrand Russell

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified image of one’s Self as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the Good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of one’s Self but of the Nature of both humans and the cosmos.—Joseph Campbell