Top 1200 Conscience Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused.

No, we are not the master of the state, said King. We are not the servant of the state. We are the conscience of the state. The churches or the religious community should be, I think, the conscience of the state. We're not just service providers.

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

I don't think you can make a lawyer honest by an act of legislature. You've got to work on his conscience. And his lack of conscience is what makes him a lawyer.

Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

POCKET, n. The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman this organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others.

There is a Sunday conscience as well as a Sunday coat; and those who make religion a secondary concern put the coat and conscience carefully by to put on only once a week.

Asked whether donor nations may be becoming fatigued ... The fatigue may be there, but I don't think we can justify it in the face of such misery. We may need to wake up our conscience and our conscience must force us to act.

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.

The legal toleration of abortion or of euthanasia can in no way claim to be based on respect for the conscience of others, precisely because society has the right and the duty to protect itself against the abuses which can occur in the name of conscience and under the pretext of freedom.

Conscience is justice's best minister; it threatens, promises, rewards, and punishes and keeps all under control; the busy must attend to its remonstrances, the most powerful submit to its reproof, and the angry endure its upbraidings. While conscience is our friend all is peace; but if once offended farewell the tranquil mind.

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

I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty.

To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek. The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience.

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.

A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.

Every Catholic parliamentarian must vote according their well-formed conscience. I would say just this. I believe it is sufficient because - I say well-formed because it is not the conscience of 'what seems to me.'

For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the heart, or pierces the conscience but what comes from a living conscience

Don't follow the mind. Don't follow the body. Follow the Conscience. That is the main principle of this text. So we should follow our Conscience.

It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another's keeping.

In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.

What distinguishes us humans from animals is our conscience. Once our conscience is gone we lose our humanness. Without conscience, humans can be far more dangerous than beasts. Beasts kill for food, humans kill for ideology. Beasts kill just enough to eat. Humans can kill endlessly.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, 'conscience,' watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a 'matter of conscience,' i.e. police business.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

A marching army first crushes the flowers before the enemy; but even before this, it crushes its own conscience! Conscience and killing cannot be together.

We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man.

Love's way of dealing with us is different from conscience's way. Conscience commands; love inspires. What we do out of love, we do because we want to.

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.

No one should be forced to violate one's conscience, nor should anyone be forced out of service of the common good because there are some things their conscience tells them they cannot do.

Given - and this is the fundamental thing - that God's mercy has no limits, if He is approached with a sincere and repentant heart, the question for those who do not believe in God is to abide by their own conscience. There is sin, also for those who have no faith, in going against one's conscience. Listening to it and abiding by it means making up one's mind about what is good and evil.

Conscience has nothing to do as lawgiver or judge; but is a witness against me if I do wrong, and which approves if I do right. To act against conscience is to act against reason and God's Law.

In the West, people don't have any real problems. It's all based on bad conscience, a very Christian notion. I don't have any bad conscience. If there's a God that created us, if I am bad, it's his fault.

A pivotal spiritual attribute is that of self-mastery-th e strength to place reason over appetite. Self-mastery builds a strong conscience. And your conscience determines your moral responses in difficult, tempting, and trying situations.

Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will.

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.

The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks

[D]on't grow old. With age comes caution, which is another name for cowardice.... Whatever else you do in life, don't cultivate a conscience. Without a conscience a man may never be said to grow old. This is an age of very old young men.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

Freedom of religion is one of the greatest gifts of God to man, without distinction of race and color. He is the author and lord of conscience, and no power on earth has a right to stand between God and the conscience.

The universal elements are integrity, vision, discipline, passion, governed by conscience. Conscience has been educated through studying and pondering the universal, timeless principles of all six major world religions.

I am bound by the texts of the Bible, my conscience is captive to the Word of God, I neither can nor will recant anything, since it is neither right nor safe to act against my conscience.

Oh, Conscience! Conscience! man's most faithful friend, Him canst thou comfort, ease, relieve, defend; But if he will thy friendly checks forego, Thou art, oh! woe for me, his deadliest foe!

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls; Conscience is but a work that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!

Always listen to the voice of your conscience. If your conscience conflicts with your faith, question everything.

Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.

Men are guided less by conscience than by glory; and yet the shortest way to glory is to be guided by conscience.

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise - not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.

More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.

God wants our conscience to be certain and sure that it is pleasing to Him. This cannot be done if the conscience is led by its own feelings, but only if it relies on the Word of God.

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.

If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

I think that the only ultimate guide we have is our conscience, and if the law of the land goes against our conscience I think we should disobey the law.