For the longest time I felt guilty for using short INLINE CSS on certain elements because of the whole "markup and styling must be kept separate". My reasoning

For the longest time I felt guilty for using short INLINE CSS on certain elements because of the whole "markup and styling must be kept separate". My reasoning for this was that maintainability was SOOO much easier. Usually I use it on tiny simple elements that have only a tiny amount of unique css (maybe a unique background for each) and repeat a lot on one page (but no other pages). So I really don't want to create 20+ unique IDs in the css, triple the code size, and all for what?