Quotes about conscience

"You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge."

I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me down

or the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades,

the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night,

before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.

He's carried my love away, the man who wed me first—

may he hold it tight, safeguard it in his grave.

May the gods—

And surely there are powers that care for goodness,

Surely somewhere justice counts—may they

And your own consciousness of acting well

Reward you as they should.

If you have no use for humankind and mortal armor,

at least respect the gods. They know right from wrong.

One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called a tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse.

The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling nor more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, melees of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!

The mind, conscious of rectitude, laughed to scorn the falsehood of report.

The person engaged in action is always unconscionable; no one except the contemplative has a conscience.

Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day. QOTD 2007·11·07 Sound file

In my position I simply can’t afford pangs of conscience. Fortunately, they fade the more power one acquires. It’s an entirely natural process.

I for my part was most thankful that I had not killed. For to have the life of a fellow-man laid upon one's conscience—deserved he his death, or deserved it not—is to my sense of right and wrong the heaviest of all burdens; and the one that wears most deeply inwards, with the dwelling of the mind on this view and on that of it.

Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent.