Victor Hugo Quotes

If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.

Was ever any wicked man free from the stings of a guilty conscience?

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience.

Guilt is the price we pay willingly for doing what we are going to do anyway.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

I know who Jack Whittaker is. And some days I don't like who I am.

Conscience: something that feels terrible when everything else feels well.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Men become cannibals of their own hearts; remorse, regret, and restless impatience usurp the place of more wholesome feeling: every thing seems better than that which is.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace.

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

If you don't feel good about something, you don't shake it off easily.

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.

I felt for my crime a just terror; I looked on my life with hate, and my passion with horror.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

I hear voices in my mind and you're worried that you're the freak,” he laughed.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.