Quotes About Conscience

The world had always done its utmost to spoil Lanny Budd, and his conscience gave him no rest about it; the more luxury he enjoyed, the more he hated the system of exploitation on which that luxury was based.

She was, as Lanny had told Esther, a true granddaughter of the Puritans. Her forefathers had sailed in a tiny vessel across a turbulent sea and landed on a cold, inhospitable coast; they had risked their lives for the sake of freedom of conscience. Now Bess was ready to give her happiness for the sake of this new religion which despised religion but which manifested all the symptoms and practiced all the zealotry of those who had received a revelation direct from God.

What are we, really; and how do we come to be, and for what purpose are we placed here, and what becomes of us when we depart? Above all, what is the origin of that strange faculty in us which we call conscience? Why do we have a sense of duty, and what is the basis of its validity, and of our assurance concerning it? If we are as the beasts of the field that perish, why do we owe any obligation to the world, or to our fellow men, or to ourselves?

National Socialism was power without conscience; you might call it the culmination of capitalism, or a degenerate form of Bolshevism—names didn't matter, so long as you understood that it was counter-revolution.

One of the hardest things we have to do is learn to take responsibility for our own actions. Trying to sidestep actions that deep down we know are shameful is a powerful instinct. From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

But his desire to do the right thing

Oggi come oggi ogni singolo uomo è tenuto, dinanzi alla sua coscienza, a suo figlio e a sua madre, dinanzi alla patria e al genere umano a rispondere con tutta la forza del cuore e della mente a una domanda: che cosa ha generato il razzismo? Che cosa bisogna fare affinché il nazismo, il fascismo, l'hitlerismo non abbiano a risorgere né al di qua né al di là dell'oceano, mai e poi mai, in secula seculorum?

In fact, in order that we may never know ourselves, we hate silence and solitariness. Lest our conscience should carry on with us an unbearable repartee, we drown out its voice in amusements, distractions, and noise. If we met ourselves in others, we would hate them.

That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.

The soul in the darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.

It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.

Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.

Man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone. And conscience, added the bishop. It's the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience. . . . You ask why I speak? I am neither informed against, nor pursued, nor hunted, say you. Yes! I am informed against! yes! I am pursued! yes! I am hunted! By whom? by myself. It is I myself who bar the way before myself, and I drag myself, and I urge myself, and I check myself and I exert myself, and when one holds himself he is well held.

At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!

This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.

Sin is a gravitation.

It may indeed be said that the word is never a more splendid mystery than when it travels in a man's mind from thought to conscience and back again to thought.

Was there a voice that whispered in his ear that he had just passed the most solemn moment of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him; that from now on, he would either be the best of men or he would be the worst of men; that he now had to rise higher, so to speak, than the bishop or fall even lower than the galley slave; that if he wanted to be good, he had to be an angel; that if he wanted to stay bad, he had to be a monster from hell?

A reflection from this heaven shone upon the bishop. But it was also a luminous transparency, for this heaven was within him: this heaven was his conscience.

The moral world has no greater spectacle than this: a troubled and restless conscience on the verge of committing an evil deed, contemplating the sleep of a good man.

Sin as little as possible-that is the law of mankind. Not to sin at all is the dream of the angel. All earthly things are subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice,—error.

He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming. Which was he to take?