Quotes about Shame

What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.

Confession is the God-given remedy for self-deception and self-indulgence. When we confess our sins before a brother-Christian, we are mortifying the pride of the flesh and delivering it up to shame and death through Christ. Then through the word of absolution we rise as new men, utterly dependent on the mercy of God. Confession is thus a genuine part of the life of the saints, and one of the gifts of grace.

Complete truthfulness is only possible where sin has been uncovered and forgiven by Jesus. Only those who are in a state of truthfulness through the confession of their sin to Jesus are not ashamed to tell the truth wherever it must be told. The truthfulness which Jesus demands from his followers is the self-abnegation which does not hide sin. Nothing is then hidden. Everything is brought forth to the light of day.

The fact that he was ashamed when he was discovered praying was for Kant an argument against prayer. He failed to see that prayer by its very nature is a matter for the strictest privacy, and he failed to perceive the fundamental significance of shame for human existence.

If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering.

In trying to be strong for them, I had cheated them out of opportunities to strengthen me. Guilt overwhelmed me, because I could-at last-see their gifts to me. The shame flowed all over me, and I began to cry. This is their ministry, I thought, and I've been spoiling it. I felt such intense shame over not letting them help.

The most shameful and embarrassing chapters in church history were not the result of anything Jesus or the apostle Paul taught. Our most embarrassing, indefensible moments resulted from Christians leveraging the old covenant concepts.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

We cannot be kind to each other here for even an hour. We whisper, and hint, and chuckle and grin at our brother's shame; however you take it we men are a little breed.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.

Life is a series of embarrassing moments which leave you feeling alone in your confusion and shame