GUILT QUOTES III

quotations about guilt

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

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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

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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

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If you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air, you'll hit someone guilty.

U2

"Dirty Day"

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He who helps the guilty, shares the crime.

PUBLILIUS SYRUS

Sententiae

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Guilt: punishing yourself before God doesn't.

ALAN COHEN

Why Your Life Sucks


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

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No punishment is so terrible as prosperous guilt.

WILLIAM E. CHANNING

Thoughts

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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

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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


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


To acquit the guilty is as great an abomination as to condemn the innocent.

J. BRADSHAW

attributed, Day's Collacon


If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Hours

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Secret guilt by silence is betrayed.

JOHN DRYDEN

The Hind and the Panther

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

VOLTAIRE

Zadig

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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

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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

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I don't believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.

ELIE WIESEL

O: The Oprah Magazine, Nov. 2000

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We each begin in innocence.
We all become guilty.

LEONARD F. PELTIER

Prison Writings

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Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.

HENRY FIELDING

Amelia

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