Quotes About Conscience

We take nothing to the grave with us, but a good or evil conscience... It is true, terrors of conscience cast us down; and yet without terrors of conscience we cannot be raised up again.

There is seemingly no biological benefit to acting with conscience; if there were, only moral individuals would survive and procreate. Sadly, we know that's not true. The benefit of conscience is that you won't suffer guilt (private) or shame (public), and that by your own self-imposed definition, you are a moral human, a special kind of animal who takes unique pride in elevating him/herself above the termites.

Peace of mind just can't be bought. Trust me: Even if your conscience doesn't stop you from playing dirty to get what you want, once you get it, it will keep you from enjoying it. As my mother used to say, "A good conscience is God's eye." Which is why I always prefer a loss to an underhanded gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.

The only answer in these modern times, as in all other times, is the blood of Christ. When our conscience rises up and condemns us, where will we turn? We turn to Christ. We turn to the suffering and death of Christ—the blood of Christ. This is the only cleansing agent in the universe that can give the conscience relief in life and peace in death.

Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.

The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

Rely upon your own judgment; be true to your own conscience; follow the light that is within you; all outward lights are so many will-o'-the-wisps. There will be those who tell you that you are foolish; that your judgment is faulty; that your conscience is all awry, and that the light within you is darkness; but heed them not. If what they say is true, the sooner you, as a searcher of wisdom, find it out the better, and you can only make that discovery by bringing your powers to the test. Therefore, pursue your course bravely.

There is indeed a certain sense of gratification when we do a good deed that gives us inward satisfaction, and a generous pride that accompanies a good conscience…These testimonies of a good conscience are pleasant; and such a natural pleasure is very beneficial to us; it is the only payment that can never fail. “On Repentance

He that loses his conscience has nothing left that is worth keeping. Therefore be sure you look to that, and in the next place look to your health; and if you have it, praise God and value it next to a good conscience.

A brave man hazards life, but not his conscience.

I sincerely believe that I have served a criminal. I led my soldiers in good conscience... but for a criminal government.

Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one's own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.

The individual cannot exist on his/her own and the collectivism should respect freedom of conscience. My struggle is about the freedom of thought.

One thing is certain. I am not afraid to act as my conscience dictates, no matter what the world may think.

The liberty of conscience, which above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious.

Probably the deepest use of music and of art is to create conscience.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience.

Self-approbation, when founded in truth and a good conscience, is a source of some of the purest joys known to man.

It became very important for me to stand up and design with a conscience for environment, you know? Just because you like clothes doesn't mean that you have to throw your principles out the window.

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.

Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God and value it next to conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of, a blessing money can't buy.

You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

There are three things that earthly riches can never do; they can never satisfy divine justice, they can never pacify divine wrath, nor can they every quiet a guilty conscience. And till these things are done man is undone.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.

Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.

Do not be content with the old anointing. It is essential to a more holy and happy life...that you seek to be anointed with new oil. Do not be satisfied with past experiences. [...] Seek to have a new revelation of Christ to your soul. Seek the renewed application of His precious blood to your conscience. Oh, seek the fresh oil!

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

I didn't see my character, Core, as a cannibal but as somebody who is extremely passionate and who doesn't have any conscience. She takes her passion to its complete extreme.

In a world of plenty, continued suffering is a terrible stain on our conscience. It is inexcusable that we not strive, with every resource at our disposal, to eliminate suffering.

We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.

I think that feeling of reward comes from being able to find sometimes an unexpected reflection or insight that seems to transcend the description itself, where you actually realize you're concluding something that is a point of view, that may come across and actually touch people's conscience or minds in a way that could change, at least if not things, change points of view.

There can be no be no better instruction... than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor to follow these commandments. 'Whatsoever ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,' and 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' If these were always followed, then everything would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions would be required. All things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for everyone's heart and conscience would guide them.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

We may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience, and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks. . . . He may live without books,-what is knowledge but grieving? He may live without hope,-what is hope but deceiving? He may live without love,-what is passion but pining? But where is the man that can live without dining?

Would you who judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure, take this rule; whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short; whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that is sin to you; however innocent it may be in itself.

I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.

The end of education is to see men made whole, both in competence and in conscience.

I cannot in good conscience vote for final passage of legislation that would pave the way to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Lust is an enemy to the purse, a foe to the person, a canker to the mind, a corrosive to the conscience, a weakness of the wit, a besotter of the senses, and finally, a mortal bane to all the body.

State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.

About what we neither know nor feel precisely while awake-whether we have a good or a bad conscience toward a certain person-our dreams instruct us fully and unambiguously.

A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.

Holy Mother Church teaches us to end the year and also our days with an examination of conscience...to be grateful and to ask for forgiveness.

If you're going to say you're Catholic, you inform your conscience so that you're activities will conform to what God is telling us through the Church. If God is telling you something outside of that, well, the Church will look at that and say: we think it is true or we don't think it is true. The Church might say: that might be true for you but it has no public normative value.