Quotes about Shame

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.

When I feel ashamed, it means I feel there isn’t just something wrong with what I’ve done, there is something wrong with who I am. Shame is often a hidden emotion and it can be paralyzing in its power.

Shame is the fear of being unworthy, and it adversely affects our relationship with God, ourselves, and others. It greatly hinders our ability to receive God’s unconditional love — and share it with others.

Shame is a secret pride; and pride is an error with regard to one's own worth, and an injustice with regard to what one has a mind to appear to others. (p. 204).

This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand self-hate that leads some to razors or pills or swan dives off beautiful bridges however tragic that is. This is the shame of seeing yourself, of being ashamed of where you live and what your father’s paycheck lets you eat and wear. This is the shame of the fat and the bald, the unbearable blush of acne, the shame of having no lunch money and pretending you’re not hungry. This is the shame of concealed sickness — diseases too expensive to afford that offer only their cold one-way ticket out. This is the shame of being ashamed, the self-disgust of the cheap wine drunk, the lassitude that makes junk accumulate, the shame that tells you there is another way to live but you are too dumb to find it. This is the real shame, the damned shame, the crying shame, the shame that’s criminal, the shame of knowing words like glory are not in your vocabulary though they litter the Bibles you’re still paying for. This is the shame of not knowing how to read and pretending you do. This is the shame that makes you afraid to leave your house, the shame of food stamps at the supermarket when the clerk shows impatience as you fumble with the change. This is the shame of dirty underwear, the shame of pretending your father works in an office as God intended all men to do. This is the shame of asking friends to let you off in front of the one nice house in the neighborhood and waiting in the shadows until they drive away before walking to the gloom of your house. This is the shame at the end of the mania for owning things, the shame of no heat in winter, the shame of eating cat food, the unholy shame of dreaming of a new house and car and the shame of knowing how cheap such dreams are. © Vern Rutsala

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.

Now since shame is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences, and we only care what opinion is held of us because of the people who form that opinion, it follows that the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

In an antique city-state, or a modern municipality, shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics — making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalties — people did not move around voluntarily and considered uprooting a horrible calamity. In larger organisms like the mega holy nation-state, with a smaller role for face-to-face encounters, and social roots, shame ceases to fulfill its duty of disciplinarian.

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Shame is a soul eating emotion.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Shame...is a first rate form of social control. Shame is what keeps us in line, what prevents us from discovering not so much who we are, but what we might become.

"I felt ashamed."

"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"

"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal — of being a mortal."

"But how could you help that?"

"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?"

Failure is not a disgrace. It’s just a pitch that you missed, and you’d better get ready for the next one... My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don’t.