Emil Cioran Quotes

There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.

I'm ashamed of what I did.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Guilt is a weird thing to me. I don't have a lot of it.

Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.

Guilt is a supreme waste of time and energy.

I don't think I will ever be able to forgive myself for what I have done.

Your people invented guilt, but my people perfected it.

I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.

She went to the window seat and sat there, sniffling, hating them all, and herself most of all. It was all her fault, everything bad that had happened.

I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated. Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous. God forgive me, for I have sinned.

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

When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.

[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.

I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.

What is guilt? Guilt is the pledge drive constantly hammering in our heads that keeps us from fully enjoying the show. Guilt is the reason they put the articles in Playboy.

I should have worked harder in my life. I suffer from a guilt complex.

Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind.

Alas! how difficult it is not to betray one's guilt by one's looks.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.

I felt that I ostracized myself by my behavior, by the past, by living with all the regrets of my mistakes, that I sort of wore a hair shirt and beat myself up most of the day thinking and regretting why did I make such a mistake? Why have I made so many mistakes?