Quotes about Conscience

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?

We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against... Death belongs to God alone.

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.

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?

had it been given to our eyes of the flesh to gaze into the consciences of others, we should be able to judge a man much more surely according to what he dreams, than according to what he thinks.

In fact, were it given to our human eye to see into the consciences of others, we would judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

We have no idea any more what it means to feel guilty. The communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them, murdurers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent in his soul and conscience than Oedipus, and yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.

Her guilty conscience was as vague as original sin.

Well, most of the time I do what feels right. But I admit there are times when I give in to my ego. Sometimes the rationalizations are so good that it's easy to sidestep what's right. But eventually you do always realize if you haven't been true to yourself. There's that tiny niggling but persistent voice at the back of your head that is not very easy to ignore for long.

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.