Quotes about shame
Dick Gregory -
I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.
Benjamin Franklin -
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
Nabil N. Jamal -
Fool me once fool me twice but shame on me if you fool me thrice.
David W. Earle -
What are humans meant to do why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning what is the meaning of human existence?
J'son M. Lee - One Family's AIDS
Shame is the demon that keeps many of us trapped in our pain healing comes when we gain the courage to confront our demon(s).
Ernest Hemingway - Death in the Afternoon
To show his nervousness was not shameful only to admit it.
William Shakespeare - Macbeth
My hands are of your colour but I shame To wear a heart so white.
Laura Lane - and Courage
There is no shame in asking for help it is one the most courageous things you’ll ever do and will lead to greater connection with those around you.
Elizabeth Strout - Anything Is Possible
They had grown up on shame it was the nutrient of their soil.
Germaine Greer -
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
John Kramer - Blythe
There is no shame in ignorance and failing there is only shame in not being willing to learn and repeating the same errors over again.
Paula Hawkins - The Girl on the Train
I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that
Jim Anderson - Unmasked: Exposing the Cultural Sexual Assault
Do I have YOUR permission to be a Supernatural God? If I want to open heaven, and in a moment in time, touch the heart of a daughter and supernaturally break all the darkness, shame, and torment in her life, MAY I DO THAT?
Sappho - Winter: Fragments of Sappho
yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful thingsand your tongue were not concocting some evil to sayshame would not hold down your eyesbut rather you would speak about what is just
John Bunyan -
What God says is best, indeed is best, though all men in the world are against it. Seeing, then, that God prefers his religion; seeing God prefers a tender conscience; seeing they that make themselves fools for the kingdom of heaven are wisest; and that the poor man that loveth Christ is richer than the greatest man in the world that hates him: Shame, depart, thou art an enemy to my salvation.
Mencius -
A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed.
Alison Bechdel - Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated
(You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.)(You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.)(And you are deserving of shame?)(I am. I am trying to tell you.) 'We were stupid,' he said, 'because we believed in things.''Why is this stupid?''Because there are not things to believe in.'(Love?)(There is no love. Only the end of love.)(Goodness?)(Do not be a fool.)(God?)(If God exists,
Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek
If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.
Laura Davis - Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse
Abuse manipulates and twists a child’s natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can’t afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she’s being abused—pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go undergr
Brené Brown - The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the with
Jalaluddin Rumi - The Essential Rumi
Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
and dignity. You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.
Scott Stabile -
Happiness is not a choice, or we’d all be happy. Let’s stop putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to be happy all the time, and to pretend we can choose to be happy whenever we want. That’s not how life works. Sure, we can make choices that reflect a commitment to our well-being, and the more of these choices we make, the more likely we are to find ourselves feeling good more often. Healthy choices are within our power, and are important. But we can’t choose happiness, and we just set oursel
David L. Conroy - Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
The suicidal lead shame-drenched lives.
Paula Hawkins - The Girl on the Train
I want to drag knives over my skin, just so that I can feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough to do that.
Hugh Howey - Beacon 23
just know that it takes a bit of courage to unlearn that shame, and to be there for others when they try to unlearn that shame, and that it all gets easier after you feel how healthy it is.
Andrea Cremer - The Conjurer's Riddle
There's no shame in honest suffering, my dear.
Amanda Craig - In a Dark Wood
Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom
Leo Tolstoy - The Forged Coupon
Proshka was a man of self-esteem. He considered himself a cut above the rest, and had a degree of personal pride. His spell in prison was a humiliating experience for him. No longer could he strut with pride before his fellows, and his spirits sank at once.Proshka went home from prison embittered not so much against Pyotr Nikolayevich as against the whole world.Everyone said the same thing: after he came out of prison, Proshka went to pieces. He grew too lazy to work, took to drink, and was soon
Jenny Lawson - Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive.
Elizabeth Wurtzel - Prozac Nation
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
B.G. Bowers - Death and Life
In the end, it was the secrets that held me hostage and fuelled my depression, but, once released, emancipation - from fear, shame, guilt and judgement - was finally possible.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - and Selections from The House of the De
It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious
Robert Uttaro - To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
Always know there are friends somewhere rooting for you. There are people you don’t know, always praying for you and lifting you before God. - Jenee, from "To the Survivors".
Emily Andrews - The Finer Points of Becoming Machine
Ricky just listens. He isn't shocked. He isn't surprised. He listens to me because he knows. He knows the shame and the guilt and the sorrow and the rage. And he does not judge me. He just listens.
Kiera Van Gelder - The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior T
I’m not interested in Bob Marley telling me to ‘lively up’ myself. The only music that satisfies me is Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor’s voice crying through industrial rhytms. In the August evenings, I lie on my bed with earphones, letting his laments roll through me like unrepentant thunderstorms. I envy the courage that carries his voice into the world. He doesn’t berate himself for pain and anger; he howls. And this delights me, even though I feel ashamed when my own rage comes to the surfa
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Deadeye Dick
Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, s
Kate McGahan -
I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?
Natalie Brenner - This Undeserved Life: Uncovering The Gifts of Grief and The Fullness of Life
Loss of any sort should stir up emotion; if it doesn’t, it’s because we’ve trained ourselves to be numb. We’ve bought into the great societal lie that emotional and sensitive is bad, is shameful, is weak, and worse yet is unlike Him.
Dennis E. Adonis -
Self redemption is the first step to exoneration from guilt.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry - and Black Women in America
Loss of social standing is an ever-present threat for individuals whose social acceptance is based on behavioral traits rather than unconditional human value.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Demons
There are crimes that are truly uncomely. With crimes, whatever they may be, the more blood, the more horror there is, the more imposing they are, the more picturesque, so to speak, but there are crimes that are shameful, disgraceful, all horror aside, so to speak, even far too ungracious...
John Okada - No-No Boy
This is the way it ought to be, he thought to himself, to be able to dance with a girl you like and really get a kick out of it because everything’ on an even keel and one’s worries are of the usual ones of unpaid bills and sickness in the family and being late to work too often. Wh can’t it be that way for me? Nobody’s looking twice at us. Nobody’s asking me where I was during the war or what the hell I am doing back on the coast. There’s no trouble to be had without looking for it. Everything’
Jon Ronson -
The word forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, 'No. There is no door. There is no way back in. We don't offer any forgiveness.' But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don't?
George Eliot - Middlemarch
The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the
Pamela Erens - Eleven Hours
Her mother’s quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline’s despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live.
Anna White - and Leaps of Faith
Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you’re alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin’ Christmas spirit.
Evinda Lepins - A Cup of Grace for the Day: Coffee Hour with Chicklit Power
Guilt addresses an external action while shame attacks the internal character!" EL
Katy Kauffman - and Victory
When you hear the haunting melody of guilt and shame, drown it out with God's song of forgiveness and love.
Sunday Adelaja -
We are not the ones who will achieve success and put this world to shame, but God will do thisthrough us.
Erik Pevernagie -
The dialectic case of the 'things we do', the 'things we have done' and the 'things we are going to do' has been haunting present and earlier generations. For ages people have been confronted with the soul-searching question how should I interpret the past and how do I move forward. Linguistic sayings, which were inherited from century to century, gave us a good deal of remarkable advice and moral guidance in this field : " Do what is right and let come what come may ", " Do well and fear not ",
S.J. Watson - Before I Go to Sleep
I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn't feel ashamed.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
The insanity of shameful desires!
J.R. Ward - Lover Enshrined
Among the problems with shame was that it in fact did not make you shorter or quieter or less visible. You just felt like you were.
Deyth Banger -
Everyone has it's own great triumph, has he own story with sadness, madness and reverses. That's how we are build, few are the people which share their story, most cases because of shame.
Brené Brown -
If we are going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light. To set down those lists of *what we're supposed to be* is brave. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.
Anna White - and Leaps of Faith
Everything we have, everything we are, is a gift. How can we judge and shame ourselves if this is true?
Nikki Sex - Accuse
Find one person to trust—there need only be one. With them, share every shame, every secret and listen to theirs… with love. Bare hearts and souls until there is understanding. Of a certainty, such honest exposure is the first step toward happiness. — André Chevalier
Anthony Liccione -
He asked me for a light to light his cigarette, and by reason of unaware, it is he that really gave light to me, made me realize how much alike we all are, breathing the same air, beating the same red blood, separated through some fortune and shame in the way of humanity.
Tara Brach -
Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these be
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.
Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch
The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.
Aphra Behn -
The only shame is the sin.
Sam Killermann -
If you can do nothing else, do whatever is in your power to make the people in your life feel completely unashamed of who they are.
Andrew Ashling - A Dish Served Cold
Why, Andrew, why would it irritate me? Do you think that being loved by you is something to be ashamed of? I don't.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Shame is embarrassment multiplied against itself until it dies under it’s own weight and we with it. Forgiveness is freedom multiplied against the Cross until it flies under it’s own liberation and we with it.
Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.
Nel Noddings - Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War
For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.
Aleksandra Layland - Of Wisdom and Valor: The Art of War. The Path of Peace.
Among the Kimbrii the greatest shame a person can bring to himself or his clan is to start a war, but the second greatest is to submit to tyranny or injustice without a fight.
TemitOpe Ibrahim -
Unlike the world that points out your flaws to ridicule you, when GOD points out your flaws, it's because He want to walk you out of it.
Isabella Poretsis -
It is a shame that most people jump to simple condemnation before considering working towards salvation.
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Cat's Cradle
I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.
Brené Brown -
It is easy to see how quickly expectations become layered, competitive and conflicting. This is how the shame web works. We have very few realistic options that allow us to meet any of these expectations. Most of the options that we do have feel like a "double bind." When Marilyn Frye describes a double bind as "a situation in which options are very limited and all of them expose us to penalty, censure or deprivation.
Harriet Lerner - and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self
We may believe that anxiety and fear don't concern us because we avoid experiencing them. We may keep the scope of our lives narrow and familiar, opting for sameness and safety. We may not even know that we are scared of success, failure, rejection, criticism, conflict, competition, intimacy, or adventure, because we rarely test the limits of our competence and creativity. We avoid anxiety by avoiding risk and change. Our challenge: To be willing to become more anxious, via embracing new situati
Karishma Magvani -
Some of the worst places I've ever lived in were fear, pain, and shame. The cost of living was so high, your only choice was a slow death.
Jenny Lawson - Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them
Katherine Paterson - Bridge to Terabithia
Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.
Ruta Sepetys - Salt to the Sea
I didn't need his criticism. I carried enough guilt on my own. I had done everything wrong. I had the highest marks in school but couldn't master common sense.
Michael Chabon - Moonglow
I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn't last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they're all still around. I'm ashamed of my
Gift Gugu Mona -
Ensure that your fame doesn't bring you shame.
Raymond Carver - Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Bauvard - Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
Every child that receives life advice should keep in mind that in every parent’s past, there’s leftover booze and contraceptives.
Carrie Fisher - Wishful Drinking
One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness an
Megan Devine - It's Ok That You're Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand
We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is notthe same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb.Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say thateverything is equal. It isn’t.It’s easier
Brené Brown - and Lead
When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, creativity, and innovation .
Alok Jagawat -
Men with Honor are not killed by swords, they die of Shame.
Harlan Ellison - Deathbird Stories
Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?
Carolyn Byers Ruch -
Build a bridge over shame by teaching kids about sexual abuse. Give them a chance to run to us should they encounter it. Be their hero.
Susan Forward - Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a ‘dirty, disgusting’ person
Sunday Adelaja -
God’s word guarantees our victory, instead of shame, he gives His children victory
Chris Kraus - I Love Dick
Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. ("Complicity is like a girl's name," writes Dodie Bellamy).
RJ Arkhipov -
There is no shame in darkness.
David W. Earle -
The key problem I encounter working with wounded, depressed, and unhappy people is a lack of connection…starting from a disconnection from themselves and then with others. This is why love often becomes so distorted and destructive. When people experience a disconnection from themselves, they feel it but do not realize the problem.
David W. Earle -
You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.