This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

Being guilty tends to engender feelings of guilt.

You have a dilemma that is even greater than the one you think you have of not knowing which is the right God. It's the dilemma of 'guilt'. Everyone has it. You can drown it in booze or say it doesn't exist, or insist that you don't feel guilt, but it is still something you have. This is because it's not a feeling; it's a condition.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

I felt a sense of shame like a burning ulcer. This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

When we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn’t align with our values, guilt — not shame — is most often the driving force. We feel guilty when we hold up something we’ve done or failed to do against our values and find they don’t match up. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but one that’s helpful. The psychological discomfort, something similar to cognitive dissonance, is what motivates meaningful change. Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. In fact, in my research I found that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better.

Guilt is often an emotion we carry from childhood and then project onto current circumstances when we felt as though we were burdens to those around us.

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

Do you feel guilty?"
"No," I said. "I didn't do it to them and I did my best to stop it. But I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty, if that helps.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

We may feel only anxious (or even sick) for a number of reasons which have no apparent connection with our conscience. Perhaps the most frequent indirect reaction of our conscience to being neglected is a vague and unspecific feeling of guilt and uneasiness, or simply a feeling of tiredness or listlessness. Sometimes such feelings are rationalized as guilt feelings for not having done this or that, when actually the omissions one feels guilty about do not constitute genuine moral problems. But if the genuine though unconscious feeling of guilt has become too strong to be silenced by superficial rationalizations, it finds expression in deeper and more intense anxieties and even in physical or mental sickness. One form of this anxiety is the fear of death; not the normal fear of having to die which every human being experiences in the contemplation of death, but a horror of dying by which people can be possessed constantly. This irrational fear of death results from the failure of having lived; it is the expression of our guilty conscience for having wasted our life and missed the chance of productive use of our capacities. To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our body.

I feel 100% responsible, even though there's nothing I could do to prevent it. What good is my guilt if it's not felt by those supposedly in charge?