158 Quotes About Remorse

I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched ... Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.

Feeling guilty is not a substitute for loving somebody; it only is an indicator that you have failed to love somebody.

Lo, God! I am Thy handiwork. I have sinned and have done great evil, yet I am still Thy handiwork, who hath made me what I am. So, though I may not undo that which I have done, yet I may, with Thy aid, do better hereafter than I have done heretofore.

In a moment of unusual clarity, we eliminate suffering by not wishing for a different life. When we affirm every manifold of our life, we begin to experience the first ray of personal illumination and commence trending on a road of living without regrets and remorse.

Please God, whatever I was I am no longer….All is forgotten, if not forgiven—it could have come to that. But I don’t trust the thought. I don’t know if it’s because it would be too easy or too terrible to imagine no one cares anymore.

I was a coward. I've been a coward. So have you. We've both got blood on our hands. We're not the heroes who saved the world, we're the villains who survived it. I've made my peace with that. You should, too, because guilt is a weight you'll never swim away from.

Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard. By morning they're good and drunk and I pop them into a baggy, then take them outside and throw the little buggers away.

Uncertainty is an excruciating state in which to exist. A moral question that never appeared in my study continues to claim prominence in my mind: Is it possible to look someone you love in the eye and tell a lie without experiencing remorse?

Accountability is not just about being or feeling sorry— it is about a set of actions that demonstrate remorse in practice. And it is not the feeling of remorse that delivers us from our shame— it is the practice of accountability in action. It is doing sorry.