William Butler Yeats Quotes

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

...conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.

That's what a conscience is made of, scar tissue ... Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.

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

God forgive me if I do wrong in following with ardor the strongest instincts of my nature.

That's the way I've been educated: I always think about what I missed and the things that you did, you did them, so you don't have to think about them any more.

I really believe guilt finds its way out of a person.

He who has regrets cannot look at himself in the mirror.

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

It brings me no joy and not enough comfort to dwell too much on things I've said or written or made or worn in the past.

The only thing worse than an active conscience is one that's retroactive.

I've had my share of doing things that I really wish I hadn't done.

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.

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

I have no problems with failures, I'm afraid of failing within myself. At times when I know I did something wrong, I don't sleep that night. I'm scared of facing myself.

I have never forgiven myself…that I might have made a mistake.

I have done bad things. I can't take them back, and they are part of who I am. Most of the time, they seem like the only thing I am.

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

Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.

See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.

You never forget about things you've done that you know you shouldn't have done. They hang around your mind, linger like a thief casing a joint for a future job. You see them there, dramatically lurking nearby in striped monochrome, leaping behind postboxes as soon as your head whips around to confront them. Or it's a familiar face in a crowd that you glimpse but then lose sight of. An annoying Where's Wally? forever locked away and hidden in every thought in your conscience. The bad thing that you did, always there to let you know.

What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And [he] thought he had the answer. Regret. Regret for things said, things done, and things not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.

She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.