Quotes About Conscience

When you're dead set on doing the right thing, sometimes it's hard to recognize that you're doing it in the wrong way.

When you choose the higher value over the lower, the more difficult over the easy, the right over the wrong, you feel good about yourself. Your self-esteem increases. You like and respect yourself more. You have a greater sense of personal pride.

Well, most of the time I do what feels right. But I admit there are times when I give in to my ego. Sometimes the rationalizations are so good that it's easy to sidestep what's right. But eventually you do always realize if you haven't been true to yourself. There's that tiny niggling but persistent voice at the back of your head that is not very easy to ignore for long.

Killian won't go for it. The mother won't go for it. Hell, Davey, I've got no morals whatsoever, and I wouldn't go for it! It's the worst goddamn thing I ever heard.

Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding.

We all struggle with what's right and wrong, Paxon. That's the nature of our lives. We have to figure out what we can live with, and hope that what we do to bring it about doesn't exact a cost that's too high. We have to decide where to draw the line.

What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.

Wizard's Tenth Rule Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self.

Willfully turing aside from the truth is treason to one's self

But you know how Richard feels. He thinks it would be wrong—more than that, he thinks it would be irresponsible to give in to such a wish when reason tells him he must not.

A civilization must have laws, but there cannot be justice when a man with no conscience metes out sentences without compassion or mercy.

What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

you were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong.

Sometimes life reaches that desperate point where the wrong thing to do has to be the right thing to do.

Sometimes what is legal isn't what is right, and sometimes it needs a witch to tell the difference.

And there are those who would rather be behind evil than in front of it

The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live.

self-betrayal—times when I had a sense of something I should do for others but didn't do it.

Aber man lebt doch nicht bloß in einer Welt, um schwach und zärtlich zu sein und alles mit Nachsicht zu behandeln, was gegen Gesetz und Gebot ist und was die Menschen verurteilen und, vorläufig wenigstens, auch noch - mit Recht verurteilen. (S.234)

There is nothing in this world more delightful than that middle state in which we mentally balance at times, possessed of the means, lured by desire, and yet deterred by conscience or want of decision.

Sometimes we don't want to move, speak, or act like that. But something deep inside us pushes us to speak and act in that way. Afterward, we feel so ashamed.

No act of killing can be justified.