Quotes About Conscience

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Morality can go to its father the devil.

Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.

Conscience is harder than our enemies, knows more, accuses with more nicety.

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.

He was unique to her among men because he's impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who's nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.

The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my text—which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims, not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.

The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my test–which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

we are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us

I hold it a crime to expose a man's sin unless I'm clear it must be done to save the innocent

At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.

the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Were uneasiness of conscience measured by extent of crime, human history had been different, and one should look to see the contrivers of greedy wars and the mighty marauders of the money-market in one troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber and cut-purse and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own hand.

it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them.

Arthur would so gladly have persuaded himself that he had done no harm! And if no one had told him the contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences—out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused: there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon.

My business is to take care of life, and to do the best I can think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive. Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects

All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict where the many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a bond. For in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite scarred, conscience continually casts backward, doubting glances.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

I'm a crack shot and I've won medals for shooting. But I don't think I could shoot a person.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

When I do a Western, I often wonder what I would have really done in that situation.