Shame - Quotes

Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it. - Stefan Zweig

Shame is closely related to guilt, but there is a key qualitative difference. No audience is needed for feelings of guilt, no one else need know, for the guilty person is his own judge. Not so for shame. The humiliation of shame requires disapproval or ridicule by others. If no one ever learns of a misdeed there will be no shame, but there still might be guilt. Of course, there may be both. The distinction between shame and guilt is very important, since these two emotions may tear a person in opposite directions. The wish to relieve guilt may motivate a confession, but the wish to avoid the humiliation of shame may prevent it. - Paul Ekman

Shame is the turnkey that keeps our evil desires in jail. - Austin O’Malley

Shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us. - Ann Patchett

Sin and shame ever go together; he that would be freed from the last must be sure to shun the company of the first. - Anne Bradstreet

The only shame is to have none. - Blaise Pascal

There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away. - Ken Kesey