Shame Quotes

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.

I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. "Shame" is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals.

A knight whose heart is set upon the Way, but who is ashamed of wearing shabby clothes and eating coarse food, is not worth calling into counsel.

The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn't saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me.

The shame that arises from praise which we do not deserve often makes us do things we should otherwise never have attempted.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.

Be not thy tongue thy own shame's orator.

If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused and didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know?

When you're betrayed there's a period of shame and then there's always forgiveness.

My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white.

Y’all dropped the ball and you should be shamed.

Shame has poor memory.

Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?

Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.

The only shame is to have none.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Human beings are the only creatures who blush - or who need to.

When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.

Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners.

Those who are overreached by our cunning are far from appearing to us as ridiculous as we appear to ourselves when the cunning of others has overreached us.

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Humans are stupid. I'm ashamed to be human.

There are few people who would not be ashamed of being loved when they love no longer.

We are ashamed of our fear; for we know that a righteous man would not suspect danger nor incur any. Wherever a man feels fear, there is an avenger.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

The Refinement of Shame. People are not ashamed to think something foul, but they are ashamed when they think these foul thoughts are attributed to them.

Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

It's so damned humiliating.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee!

Ridicule dishonors a man more than dishonor does.

A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed.

If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.

The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.

Past all shame, so past all truth.

The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.” (Analects 4.9)

It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

To him who disgraces his family life is no life, and to such a person there is no one a friend, neither while living nor when dead.

There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.

The bite of conscience is indecent.

If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

For a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived. Did I reform, you ask? No. I'm not ashamed anymore.

It's far better to make people angry than to make them ashamed.

You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.

For my part, I may speak it to my shame,I have a truant been to chivalry;And so I hear he doth account me too.

The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

Beware of jokes from which we go away hollow and ashamed.

Shame makes people abandon their children and drink themselves to death. It also keeps us from true happiness. An apology is a glorious release.

Pride gets into the Coach, and Shame mounts behind.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

She wanted to cry, but she did not want Peter to see her cry, and she especially did not want Teacher, with her flowing hair, to see her cry.

People are often vain of their passions, even of the worst, but envy is a passion so timid and shame-faced that no one ever dare avow her.