Topic

Conscience

Conscience in this collection is less the moral guardian of popular imagination than the uncomfortable thing you carry. Twain's good-friends-good-books-and-a-sleepy-conscience as the ideal life is the opening joke that contains a truth: conscience that wakes at three in the morning is an obstacle to functioning. Johnson's bachelors-have-consciences-married-men-have-wives is the social version: the external voice of correction replaces the internal one in marriage. Camus on a work of art as a confession connects conscience to creativity: the impulse to make something is partly the impulse to acknowledge what you have done and thought. Napoleon on doctors having more lives to answer for than generals is the institutional conscience argument: those who kill in large numbers require larger accountability. La Bruyère on avoiding lawsuits to protect conscience, health, and property is the practical instruction: the legal process is as corrupting to the conscience as the wrong that provoked it.

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Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

Prayer is a strong wall, and a fort of the church.

Source: Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther (1566/1883 translation)

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

There is no conceivable way of making people do things they do not wish to do.

Source: What I Believe (1925)

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great

The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls

Conscience is an oracle of the divinity

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

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without.

By the law of nature, there is no pleasure in suffering; but divine love, when it reigns in a heart, makes it take delight in its sufferings.