35 Quotes About Guilt Trips

Being emotionally manipulated can be exhausting and leave you feeling powerless. These quotes about guilt trips capture the types of feelings and challenges you can find yourself being confronted with.

“Abuse manipulates and twists a child’s natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings.”

“All I could think of was that the teachers must’ve found the illegal stash of candy I’d been selling out of my dorms room.”

“But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.”

“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.”

“Don’t take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.”

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”

“Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.”

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”

“Have to love the preemptive guilt trip! I will be visiting home for Mother’s Day. Hoping for minimal”baby cannon” talk, but realistically that’s going to be a big part of the day.”

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response.”

“I have tried to live my life with no regrets. Because regrets will become guilt in some cases, and guilt eats away at your sanity”

“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.”

“In an extroverted society, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that an introvert is often unconsciously deemed guilty until proven innocent.”

“It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.”

“Maybe there’s more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.”

“Men are that they might have joy… not guilt trips.”

“Move forward with no second-guessing, no guilt trips, no hesitation. Your purpose is to recreate yourself anew in each moment.”

“Nobody knows what God’s plan is for your life, but a whole lot of people will guess for you if you let them.”

“Once you become a mother, you always have a guilt trip. You always try to do the best, but you feel you can always be better.”

“Only when we accept and forgive all that is or has been the good, the bad, and the ugly of our human lives can we get off the guilt trip and back into the flow. That means we must love our humanness and all of our failings; we must accept, learn from, and yes, even love our mistakes.”

“Pack your bags, we’re going on a guilt trip!”

“People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That’s not the idea at all.”

“Religious guilt will never grow the kind of love you want in someone.”

“Sometimes our wants or needs have nothing to do with being ungrateful and everything to do with making a mistake.”

“The idea of karma is that you continually get the teaching that you need to open your heart.”

“The journey of life is both too short and too precious to be sidetracked by guilt trips.”

“There appears to be a disturbing trend in this nation to try to force single moms to choose between their children and their careers. If they take their careers seriously, they are labeled as bad mothers.”

“There are many types of marriage relationships and all of them can work, but none is sadder than the one that doesn’t represent peace in your heart.”

“There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.”

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

“There is nothing spiritual about a marriage that uses guilt, blame, shame or religious manipulations to keep a relationship together.”

“This is the first step toward understanding the process of real, lasting change: simply knowing with certainty that you can do whatever you need to do”

“True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them.”

“Unhappiness comes from living the life of two people–the one people want you to be and the one you want to be.”

“We know that babies develop as well in nonmaternal as in maternal care, as long as the care is of good quality. The issue is not who gives the care but the quality of that care.”

When you know someone suffering through feelings of loneliness and emotional pain, offering comfort versus guilt can bring them the encouragement they need.