Quotes About Conscience

Those who do the right thing don't do it simply because of how they feel: the decision has to be based on reason, reason that tells you what your duty is, regardless of how you happen to feel.

I don't think I'm allowed to kill something because I am frightened.

you, pious milktoast: you don't murder, steal or commit adultery—because you are afraid. All your virtues are daughters of fear.

La conciencia era un dolor insoportable.

It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are engaged in noble and courageous acts.

The business of voting your conscience is: Do you really care just about how you feel? or, Do you care about what happens to the world? If you care about what you feel you don't have any conscience, you're not a moral agent at all, so stop talking about conscience, you don't have any.

Lesser evil voting should be simply called elementary rationality and elementary morality.

There is no disgrace in staying behind, not when it's the right thing.

a man who could tell that terrible lie, live with that terrible lie, had something missing inside him.

And he had no qualms whatsoever about prying into someone's private thoughts and experiences. And no guilt about hoarding his own.

The libidinal fantasy-stream only becomes significant for other people, i.e. capable of mediation, if it is socialised through fusion with the canon, while at the same time energizing and individualizing the canon or the conscience.

The pinnacle of artistic creation is achieved when the spontaneity and inventiveness of fantasy-stream are so fused with knowledge of the regularities of the material and the judgement of the artist's conscience that the innovative fantasies emerge as if by themselves in a way that matches the demands of both material and conscience. This is one of the most socially fruitful types of sublimation process.

If the Moral Law doesn't exist, then there's no moral difference between the behavior of Mother Teresa and that of Hitler.

The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

All humans search for either reasons to be good or excuses to be bad.

Reverend King's equation. Throw us in jail and we will still love you…But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. No, he could not make that leap to love.

As long as a man is still motivated either by the fear of punishment or by the hope of reward—or, for that matter, by the wish to appease the superego—conscience has not had its say as yet.

I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

Logotherapy conceives of conscience as a prompter which, if need be, indicates the direction in which we have to move in a given life situation. In order to carry out such a task, conscience must apply a measuring stick to the situation one is confronted with, and this situation has to be evaluated in the light of a set of criteria, in the light of a hierarchy of values

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

It is, therefore, up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience. There are people, however, who do not interpret their own lives merely in terms of a task assigned to them but also in terms of the taskmaster who has assigned it to them.

So conscience is essentially intuitive. To anticipate what is not yet, but is to be made real, conscience must be based on intuition. And it is in this sense that conscience may be called irrational.

Where the spiritual self steeps itself in its unconscious depths, there occur the phenomena of conscience, love, and art. Where it happens the other way around... we have to deal with a neurosis or a psychosis, depending on whether the case is psychogenic or somatogenic.