Inner Shame Quotes

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

I was doing a children's book on self-esteem, and I really felt like I wanted to shed the shame I'd been feeling - and maybe make it easier for women my age who had probably felt bad about themselves.

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.

I criticize myself ruthlessly, but never mention the faults of which I am truly ashamed.

I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.

Many people hope a spiritual practice will let them avoid what they are ashamed of. But when you hide something from yourself, you are going to project it onto your world. You continually find it in others and it becomes the source of prejudices and dogmatic views. On top of that, you feel bad about yourself, because you aren't the loving, open-minded, "spiritual" person you'd like to be.

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.

The best antidote for loneliness, hopelessness, and fear is vulnerability: sharing your secrets and talking about what shames you, what you fear.

It's difficult to talk about, you know, my inadequacies, my inability to stay sober when I'm a relatively bright man and I've had a lot of great blessings and a lot of great opportunities.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

It is because I perceive the danger in the practice of mystic wonders, that I loath, abhor, and am ashamed thereof.

True virtue, when she errs, needs not the eyes of men to excite her blushes; she is confounded at her own presence, and covered with confusion of face.

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.

Almost all our desires, when examined, contain something too shameful to reveal.

I hosted the Producer's Guild Awards, and it went well, and I was very happy in the moment, and it was a fun night. But I wake up the next day like someone who did crack the night before and told off the world, and I'm ashamed of the whole idea that anyone should listen to me, or the idea that I need that much approval.

It's the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.

I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for.