quotations about conscience
I will place within them as a guide
My umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well us'd they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Conscience is the playback of the still, small voice that warned you not to do it in the first place.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Why should not Conscience have vacation
As well as other Courts o' th' nation?
Have equal power to adjourn,
Appoint appearance and return?
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
A man's conscience can tell him his situation better than seven watchmen in a lofty tower.
BEN SIRA
Sirach 37:14
Congratulations. You have met your conscience. In my experience, the world is divided between those who have one and those who don't. And the ones with one are divided into those who will act on their conscience and those who won't. Those who will are, I'm afraid, the smallest category.
JEAN FERRIS
Twice Upon a Marigold
I'd fired conscience months back, but it was still hanging around, miserable, unshaven, nowhere else to go.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
We never do anything so secretly, but that it is in the presence of two witnesses: God, and our own conscience.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe;
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard III
I never appear in public with a soiled conscience, a tarnished honor, threadbare scruples, or an insult that I haven't washed away.
EDMOND ROSTAND
Cyrano de Bergerac
And so ought the conscience to be felt and known sacredly and not worn outside or proclaimed wantonly. There are privacies in the soul which willfully to strip naked is no more virtuous than in the body.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
SIGMUND FREUD
Totem and Taboo
Conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
The wounds of conscience always leave a scar.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Conscience is an exact recorder, that writes every man's history; an inward witness, that will sooner or later speak the whole truth; an impartial judge, whose sentence will acquit or condemn.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
A minority may do for a society what the conscience does for an individual.
JOHN HOWARD YODER
The Priestly Kingdom
The happy soul, in whose heart this peace of God hath erected her throne, has firmly resolved with Job, that holy sufferer, that his heart shall not reproach him, with any approven guile, so long as he lives. He goes not about to patch up a fatal peace betwixt his conscience and his lusts; (a very common dreadful mistake;) but if iniquity be in his hand, he puts it far away.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
Some men are born under the law; their whole life is a continued struggle between the lower principles of their nature and the higher. These are what are called men of principle; each of their best actions is a distinct choice between conflicting motives. One propension would bear them here; another there; a third would hold them still: into the midst the living will goes forth in its power, and selects whichever it holds to be best. The habitual supremacy of conscience in such men gives them an idea that they only exert their will when they do right; when they do wrong they seem to "let their nature go "; they say that "they are hurried away": but, in fact, there is commonly an act of will in both cases ;--only it is weaker when they act ill, because in passably good men, if the better principles are reasonably strong, they conquer; it is only when very faint that they are vanquished.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.
LORD ACTON
postscript of letter to Mandell Creighton, Apr. 5, 1887
Conscience is ... the God dwelling in us.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms