Quotes About Conscience

Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

Congratulations. You have met your conscience. In my experience, the world is divided between those who have one and those who don't. And the ones with one are divided into those who will act on their conscience and those who won't. Those who will are, I'm afraid, the smallest category. They will *jeito*. It's Brazilian Portuguese. It means to find a way to get something done, no matter what the obstacles.

Conscience, as a mentor, the guide and compass of every act, leads ever to happiness. When the individual can stay alone with his or her conscience and get its approval, without knowing force or specious knowledge, then he or she begins to know what real happiness is.

Make friends with guilt. Guilt is a beautiful emotion that alerts us when something is wrong so that we may achieve peace with our conscience. Without conscience there would be no morality. So we can greet guilt cordially and with acceptance, just as we do all other emotions. After we respond to guilt, it has done its job and we can release it.

It is the nature of all hypocrites and false prophets to create a conscience where there is none, and to cause conscience to disappear where it does exist.

Let Christians all understand that conscience is between themselves and God alone. They are not at liberty to impose even their freedom of conscience upon another; but by the laws of the kingdom of Christ, they are obliged even to refrain at times from exercising their own freedom, out of consideration for others.

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

If you don't have a conscience, what is your behavior like? Apparently, if you don't have a conscience, if you don't really . . . love, then the only thing that's left for you is the game - it's about controlling things.

The opponent strikes you on your cheek, and you strike him on the heart by your amazing spiritual audacity in turning the other cheek. You wrest the offensive from him by refusing to take his weapons, by keeping your own, and by striking him in his conscience from a higher level. He hits you physically, and you hit him spiritually.

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

Serve God with integrity, and if you achieve no success, at least no sin will lie upon your conscience.

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?

Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.

To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I have a different idea of elegance. I don't dress like a fop, it's true, but my moral grooming is impeccable. I never appear in public with a soiled conscience, a tarnished honor, threadbare scruples, or an insult that I haven't washed away. I'm always immaculately clean, adorned with independence and frankness. I may not cut a stylish figure, but I hold my soul erect. I wear my deeds as ribbons, my wit is sharper then the finest mustache, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs.

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.

Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.

After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

I have thought about this issue of abortion time and again. It is not an easy issue for most people. I came to believe over the years that a woman should be able to make this agonizing decision with her doctor and her family and her conscience, and that we should be very careful that we don't make that decision a crime except in the most extreme circumstances.

Conscience is like a pet: If you spoil it by too much attention it'll start yipping at the most inopportune times.

... bringing up daughters for nothing but marriage, mingles poison in the cup of domestic life, is traitorous to the virtue of both sexes, for neither suffers alone--is adverse to the happiness, to the development of conscience and to religion, and introduces to the dwellings of wretchedness and despair. The result of this degradation is pride, intemperance, licentiousness--nay, every vice, misery, and degradation.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe

Integrity is the light that shines from a disciplined conscience.

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.

Philanthropist, n.: A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

Every religion is good—every religion is true to him who in his good caution and conscience believes it.

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

I decide on the basis of conscience. A genuine leader doesn't reflect consensus, he molds consensus.

The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking his blessing and his help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

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.

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

Are you angry? Be angry at your sins, beat your soul, afflict your conscience, but strict in judgement and a terrible punisher of your own sins. This is the benefit of anger, wherefore God placed it in us.

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware

Being a man with a conscience I simply felt that I had to do something - anything! - about the world we live in.

The exploitation of women, mass hunger, disregard for freedom of conscience and for freedom of speech, widespread and racial discrimination all these evils are far too prevalent to be overlooked.

Do your duty, and don't swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God.

No torment in the world is comparable to an accusing conscience.

Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.

We've actually seen Black man murders [in] many a major city in the United States - New York City, St. Louis, Missouri, from Cleveland to Baltimore. It was those sorts of incidents that were very much prevalent in the forefront of that jury's conscience that allowed them to believe that this man [O.J. Simpson] could have been set up.

The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission;he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality.

Avoid any semblance of pornography. It is dangerous and addictive. If you continue to view pornography, your spirit will become desensitized and your conscience will erode.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

The collective psychology is something very close to being sacred - we can do it but we don't do it. We should understand that the Holocaust in the European conscience is reaching a point which is very close to what is sacred for people in the Southern countries, whether they are Muslims or not. Because of that we need to try to have intellectual empathy.

Rules of society are nothing; one's conscience is the umpire.

There is no more blessed way of living, than the life of faith based upon a covenant-keepin g God - to know that we have no care, for He cares for us; that we need have no fear, except to fear Him; that we need have no troubles, because we have cast our burdens upon the Lord, and are conscience that He will sustain us.