Conscience

From Wikiquote

Conscience is an aspect of Awareness or Perception involving the ability to recognize whether one's decisions or actions are rightful or wrongful in regard to the accepted values of oneself or others.

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Alphabetized by author

• If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.
  • Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847), Helen Burns in Ch. 8

• The range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense.
  • Joseph Conrad in Henry James — An Appreciation (1905)

• Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgement are the same thing, and as the judgement, so also the conscience may be erroneous.
  • Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651)

• On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of good will to come together with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain't goin' study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" (31 March 1968)

• Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
  Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe;
  Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
  • William Shakespeare, in Richard III (ca. 1591), King Richard in (Act V, scene iii)

• The play's the thing,
  Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
  • William Shakespeare in Hamlet (ca. 1600), Hamlet in (Act II, scene II)

• How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.
  • Kenneth Tynan, review of Le Misanthrope, by Molière, at the Piccadilly (1962), from Tynan Right and Left (1967), p.117

• Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.
  • Vincent van Gogh, as quoted in Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh (1995) edited by Irving Stone and Jean Stone, p. 181

[edit] Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• A good conscience is the palace of Christ; the temple of the Holy Ghost; the paradise of delight; the standing Sabbath of the saints.
  • Augustine of Hippo, p. 157.

• Be fearful only of thyself, and stand in awe of none more than thine own conscience.
  • Robert Burton, p. 157.

• The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.
  • John Calvin, p. 157.

• Conscience is God's vicegerent in the soul.
  • David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, p. 156.

• Every one of us, whatever his speculative opinions, knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.
  • James Anthony Froude, p. 156.

• An old historian says about the Roman armies that marched through a country, burning and destroying every living thing, "They make a solitude, and they call it peace." And so men do with their consciences. They stifle them, sear them, forcibly silence them, somehow or other; and then, when there is a dead stillness in the heart, broken by no voice of either approbation or blame, but doleful, like the unnatural quiet of a deserted city, then they say, "It is peace;" and the man's uncontrolled passions and unbridled desires dwell solitary in the fortress of his own spirit! You may almost attain to that.
  • Alexander Maclaren, p. 158.

• We never do evil so effectually as when we are led to do it by a false principle of conscience.
  • Blaise Pascal, p. 157.

• The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it, but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.
  • Madame de Stael, p. 157.

• Trust that man in nothing, who has not a conscience in every thing.
  • Laurence Sterne, p. 157.

• It is quite certain that, if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator."
  • John Campbell Shairp, p. 156.

• Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.
  • Samuel Smiles, p. 156.

• There is in man a conscience which outlives the sensations, resolutions, and emotions of the hour, and rises above them all.
  • Edward Thompson, p. 157.

• Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.
  • George Washington, p. 157.

• There is no evil which we cannot face or fly from but the consciousness of duty disregarded.
  • Daniel Webster, p. 157.

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