quotations about conscience
For conscience may be turned awry, or fall sick in a moral pestilence, like any other faculty.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course: a quiet conscience.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus
If conscience may sicken by induration as often is seen, until there be no sensitiveness, why may it not sicken also the other way by being nursed indoors, as it were, till it grows soft and takes a shock from the natural air? Perhaps conscience is in this state when persons object to aught in its own place, or conceive too readily that it has no place, as for example dancing and other pleasures. For there are many to whom a pleasure itself savors of evil and every gayety is a peril.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Sin in the conscience, is like Jonah in a ship, which causeth such a tempest, that the conscience is like a troubled sea, whose waters cannot rest, or it is like a mote in the eye, which causeth a perpetual trouble while it is there.
THOMAS BROOKS
A Cabinet of Jewels
If a kind man stands by his conscience and exhibits truth in his words and actions, he will stand by God regardless of his faith.
SUZY KASSEM
Rise Up and Salute the Sun
The wound of conscience is no sear, and Time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe.
JOHANN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER
Titan
Conscience is the most sacred of all property.
JAMES MADISON
The National Gazette, Mar. 29, 1792
I am not conscious of any harm that I have done or wished to any mortal. I bear no malice to any being. To my enemies, if any I have, I am willing to afford assistance; therefore towards man I maintain a conscience void of offense.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
letter to John Adams, April 19, 1764
Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.
KARL BARTH
The Word of God and the Word of Man
Nearly everybody yields up his conscience, his practical judgment, into the keeping of others.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, June 1, 1880
O faithful conscience, delicately pure,
How doth a little failing wound thee sore!
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Purgatorio
Points of conscience are to be distinguished from matters of taste or judgment, for not everything which we disapprove must be lifted into a matter of conscience.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves a constant ease and serenity within us, and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can possibly befall us.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Guardian, Aug. 15, 1713