Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

My conscience aches but it's going to lose the fight.

My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent.

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

Since I have introduced this term I had always a bad conscience. . . . I cannot help to feel it strongly and I am unable to believe that such an ugly thing should be realized in nature.

I more than suspect that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong, -- that he feels the blood of this Mexican war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.... He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.

I was tormented with guilt for years and years. In fact, it was so bad that if I didn't feel wrong, I didn't feel right!

Fear and Guilt are the only enemies of man.

Why does man regret, even though he may endeavour to banish any such regret, that he has followed the one natural impulse, rather than the other; and why does he further feel that he ought to regret his conduct? Man in this respect differs profoundly from the lower animals.

The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

Guilt can make you doubt yourself at the very moment when you need to proceed with certainty.

A guilty conscience never feels secure.

Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying.

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.

I have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk.

Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure.

The urging of that word, judgment, hath bred a kind of remorse in me.

I didn't want to be the monster! I didn't want to kill this room full of harmless children! I didn't want to lose everything I'd gained in a lifetime of sacrifice and denial!

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

Do you absolutely despise me, Walter?" "No." He hesitated and his voice was strange. "I despise myself.

Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed.

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.