H. L. Mencken Quotes

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man.

There was a sentence in your letter that struck me, “I wish I were far away from everything, I am the cause of all, and bring only sorrow to everybody, I alone have brought all this misery on myself and others.” These words struck me because that same feeling, just the same, not more nor less, is also on my conscience.

I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.

You'll say I'm self-destructive I constructed all this tragedy. Go tell them all it's all my fault You'll tell them I was crazy . And anyway it's over now Nothing left to say.

The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.

Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?

The worst things weren't outside of you.

Every man is his own worst enemy

I’ve blamed her for all of this, for leaving, for ruining me. And maybe that was the seed of it, but from that one little seed grew this tumor of a flowering plant. And I’m the one who nurtures it. I water it. I care for it.I nibble from its poison berries. I let it wrap around my neck, choking the air right out of me. I’ve done that. All by myself. All to myself.

All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

Each of us bears his own Hell.

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.

The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.

Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.

How tedious is a guilty conscience!

Conscience, the executioner, shaking her secret scourge.

I am so sorry. I wish you knew even one tenth of one percent of how sorry I am. ...It was my fault. Can I kill myself here, or should I do it outside, so the mess on your carpet doesn't upset your mother?

Guilt was its own prison.

She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.

I know that I brought this all on myself. I know that I deserve this. I'd do anything not to be this way. I'd do anything to make it up to everyone. And to not have to see a psychiatrist, who explains to me about being "passive aggressive.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

Good people end up in Hell because they can't forgive themselves.