875 Quotes About Shame

Stop making shame a virtue.

She had consented to be the Dona her world had demanded - a superficial, lovely creature, who walked, and talked, and laughed, accepting praise and admiration with a shrug of the shoulder as natural homage to her beauty, careless, insolent, deliberately indifferent, and all the while another Dona, a strange, phantom Dona, peered at her from a dark mirror and was ashamed.

Do not be ashamed of help.

If the goal is freedom, be prepared to fight battles you didn't ask for. If the goal is authenticity, be prepared to confront shame that wasn't yours to carry.

Personally, I would be ashamed to be rich and have precious and expensive goods only to show to the other people that I have more worth than them when in some parts of the world there are people who suffer. No one has more worth than anyone. Everyone can be worthy if he has conditions in his life that enable him to reclaim his values. Worth lies in culture, not in appearance and possession. Besides, every person has his own mission in this world and everyone is valuable.

I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that

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.

The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.

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.