C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Shame
O shame! where is thy blush?
Those who fear not guilt yet start at shame.
Hide, for shame, Romans, your grandsires’ images, that blush at their degenerate progeny!
A nightingale dies for shame if another bird sings better.
I count him lost who is lost to shame.
False shame only is harmful.
Where shame is, there is also fear.
Conscience is a blushing, shame-faced spirit.
Shame is the dying embers of virtue.
Shame sticks ever close to the ribs of honor.
Nature’s hasty conscience.
Shame is a feeling of profanation.
If not yet lost to all the sense of shame.
The most curious offspring of shame is shyness.
To disregard what the world thinks of us is not only arrogant but utterly shameless.
Of all evils to the generous, shame is the most deadly pang.
The worst kind of shame is being ashamed of frugality or poverty.
I am ashamed of my master and not of my servitude.
While shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished from the heart.
It is the guilt, not the scaffold, which constitutes the shame.
I know not how to tell thee! Shame rises in my face, and interrupts the story of my tongue!
Shame greatly hurts or greatly helps mankind.
Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.
In shame there is no comfort but to be beyond all bounds of shame.
Shame is like the weaver’s thread; if it breaks in the net, it is wholly imperfect.
Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities.
As soon as she (woman) begins to be ashamed of what she ought not, she will not be ashamed of what she ought.
Nothing is truly infamous, but what is wicked; and therefore shame can never disturb an innocent and virtuous mind.
He that blushes not at his crime, but adds shamelessness to shame, hath nothing left to restore him to virtue.
The bold defiance of a woman is the certain sign of her shame; when she has once ceased to blush, it is because she has too much to blush for.
There are two restraints which God has laid upon human nature, shame and fear; shame is the weaker, and has place only in those in whom there are some reminders of virtue.
I can bear scorpion’s stings, tread fields of fire, in frozen gulfs of cold eternal lie, be tossed aloft through tracts of endless void, but cannot live in shame.
For often vice, provoked to shame, borrows the color of a virtuous deed; thus libertines are chaste, and misers good, a coward valiant, and a priest sincere.
Shame is a feeling of profanation. Friendships, love and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence,—to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought,—many more, to be spoken.