quotations about guilt
No acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.
HENRY FIELDING
Tom Jones
Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole--corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
A guilty mind can be eased by nothing but repentance; by which what was ill done is revoked and morally voided and undone.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Maybe there's more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.
VERONICA ROTH
Divergent
No love or pity, pardon or excuse should soften the sharp pang of reparation for the guilty man.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
Guilt is a poor, helpless, dependent being. Without the alliance of able, diligent, and let me add, fortunate fraud, it is inevitably undone. If a guilty culprit be obstinately silent, it forms a deadly presumption against him; if he speaks, talking only tends to his discovery, and his very defence often furnishes the materials for his conviction.
JUNIUS
letter to the printer of the Public Advertiser, March 4, 1768
He who helps the guilty, shares the crime.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
Sententiae
I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I'm unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It's all the anxiety with none of the free stuff.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
If you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air, you'll hit someone guilty.
U2
"Dirty Day"
To acquit the guilty is as great an abomination as to condemn the innocent.
J. BRADSHAW
attributed, Day's Collacon
No punishment is so terrible as prosperous guilt.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Secret guilt by silence is betrayed.
JOHN DRYDEN
The Hind and the Panther
Guilt: punishing yourself before God doesn't.
ALAN COHEN
Why Your Life Sucks
When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
HANNAH ARENDT
Crises of the Republic
Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.
HENRY FIELDING
Amelia
Think not that guilt requires the burning torches of the Furies to agitate and torment it; their own frauds, their crimes, their remembrances of the past, their terrors of the future are ever present to their minds.
CICERO
Three Books of Offices: Or Moral Duties
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
VOLTAIRE
Zadig
If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
I don't believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.
ELIE WIESEL
O: The Oprah Magazine, Nov. 2000
Guilt is a useless feeling. It's never enough to make you change direction--only enough to make you useless.
DANIEL NAVERI
Another Faust