"Calvin : There's no problem so awful, that you cant add some guilt to it and make it even worse."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
— Aldous Huxley

"If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. "
— Graham Greene

"When she can't bring me to heal with scolding, she bends me to shape with guilt"
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted."
— Franz Kafka

"You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be. "
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika)

"We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.'"
— Tom Hodgkinson (The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, and Waste)

"Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"She looks at the swings, and I can see she’s imagining what they’d look like if the kids weren’t there. The guilt of this holds her down momentarily. It appears to be there constantly. Never far away, despite her love for them.

I realize that nothing belongs to her anymore and she belongs to everything."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face."
— Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)

"Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does."
— Evan Esar

"It's better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one."
— Voltaire

"I never cut my neighbor's throat;
My neighbor's gold I never stole;
I never spoiled his house and land;
But God have mercy on my soul!

For I am haunted night and day
By all the deeds I have not done;
O unattempted loveliness!
O costly valor never won!"
— Marguerite Wilkinson

"So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed."
— Philip K Dick

"The greater evil who is in-
When both in wayward paths are straying?
The poor sinner for the pain
Or he who pays for the sin?"
— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

"And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our act. Everything turns on our intentions."
— Sándor Márai (Embers)

"It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead: A Novel)

"Tragische Schuld verkörpert sich im permanenten Konflikt zwischen der uralten religiösen Vorstellung von der Missetat als einer Beschmutzung, die einer ganzen Rasse anhaftet und unausweichlich von einer Generation auf die nächste vererbt wird [...], und dem neuen vom Gesetz übernommenen Konzept, nach dem der Schuldige definiert wird als Privatperson, die sich aus eigenem Antrieb und unter keinem Zwang stehend entschlossen hat, ein Verbrechen zu begehen."
— Jean-Pierre Vernant (Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece)

"Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)

’ Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.’
"
— Thomas De Quincey

"(In reaction to Hiroshima): If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker."
— Albert Einstein

"Unschuld ist kein Schutz."
— Thomas Fuller

"Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves."
— Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip)

"The greater who is in-
When both in wayward paths are straying?
The poor sinner for the pain
Or he who pays for the sin?"
— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

"The law does not expect a man to be prepared to defend every act of his life which may be suddenly and without notice alleged against him."
— John Marshall

"Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified."
— P.D. James (The Lighthouse)