92 Inspiring Conscience Quotes

In a world where choices constantly shape our lives, the voice of conscience serves as an unwavering compass. It guides us through the complexities of morality, urging us to consider the impact of our actions. Whether it's the quiet nudge that steers us toward kindness or the powerful call to stand up for what's right, our conscience plays a pivotal role in defining who we are. In this blog post, we've gathered a selection of 92 inspiring quotes that celebrate the wisdom, courage, and introspection our conscience brings to the forefront. Allow these words to resonate with your inner self, and let them inspire you to live with greater awareness and integrity.

1. “If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.” - Charlotte Brontë

2. “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” - George Washington

3. “Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.” - Francois Rabelais

4. “Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.” - Jim Carroll

5. “[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.” - Bertrand Russell

6. “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” - Mark Twain

7. “Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.” - Tom Hodgkinson

8. “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

9. “The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority.” - Mahatma Gandhi

10. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” - John Milton

11. “It is neither right nor safe to go against my conscience.” - Martin Luther

12. “That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins.” - Walter M. Miller Jr.

13. “Character is doing what you don't want to do but know you should do.” - Joyce Meyer

14. “A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” - George Bernard Shaw

15. “Congratulations. You have met your conscience. In my experience, the world is divided between those who have one and those who don't. And the ones with one are divided into those who will act on their conscience and those who won't. Those who will are, I'm afraid, the smallest category. They will *jeito*. It's Brazilian Portuguese. It means to find a way to get something done, no matter what the obstacles.” - Jean Ferris

16. “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” - Leo Tolstoy

17. “Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.” - George Eliot

18. “Notre conscience est un juge infaillible, quand nous ne l'avons pas encore assassinée.” - Honoré de Balzac

19. “Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.” - Evan Esar

20. “Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde

21. “Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen."(Reply to the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521)” - Martin Luther

22. “Does changing for the better absolve you of all the wicked shit you did before?No. March fills my head like a warm glow. Instead you receive the twin delights of guilt and regret.” - Ann Aguirre

23. “An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. ” - Anthony Standen

24. “Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.” - Terry Tempest Williams

25. “It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.” - Henry David Thoreau

26. “Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand.(it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)” - Edgar Allan Poe

27. “Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.Listen to it carefully.” - Richard Bach

28. “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ” - Carl Gustav Jung

29. “I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.” - John Henry Newman

30. “The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” - Gaylord Nelson

31. “The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.” - Max Planck

32. “Only those with a conscience can find an action unconscionable.” - F.D. Crandall

33. “Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men...?” - St. Athanasius

34. “Things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.” - Anna Godbersen

35. “The bite of conscience is indecent.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

36. “There is no conscience in a real war.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

37. “I'm not so fond of people myself, Evvy, but I took my vows for a reason. There are two classes of people in the world, the destroyers and the builders. I want to build, not destroy. You need to ask yourself who you're going to be.” - Tamora Pierce

38. “How pitiful is an intelligence used only to make excuses to quieten the conscience.” - Ignazio Silone

39. “I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.” - David Sedaris

40. “Conscience is thus explained only as the voice of God in the soul.” - Peter Kreeft

41. “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.” - Mahatma Gandhi

42. “You govern people, you do good and bad things.If you don't have guts to do bad, then step aside.” - Toba Beta

43. “I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

44. “Betrayal is common for men with no conscience.” - Toba Beta

45. “Conscience defined by the elders,passed on to the next generations.” - Toba Beta

46. “Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.'If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.” - Robert G. Ingersoll

47. “In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.” - Viktor E. Frankl

48. “Isana laughed. "And you, lady? Are you a woman of conscience or of ambition?"The lady smiled. "That's a question rarely asked here at court.""And why is that?""Because a woman of conscience would tell you that she is a person of conscience. A woman of ambition would tell you that she is a person of conscience—only much more convincingly.” - Jim Butcher

49. “When spontaneous demoralizing thoughts seep into your conscience, don't trip...allowing them to fester. These are random tests of your conviction and determination. Large or small, your reaction to such intrusions is a defining moment for which no one else, but you, can mitigate.” - T.F. Hodge

50. “Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.” - Marquis de Sade

51. “Conscience is like a pet: If you spoil it by too much attention it'll start yipping at the most inopportune times.” - Connie Brockway

52. “Atticus, you must be wrong." "How's that?" "Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong. . ." "They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.” - Harper Lee

53. “Good girls hold their heads high by daylight, Their grace and their virtue soaring with kites,While bad girls slink along in their shame-Everyone stares at them, everyone blames.But those bad girls sleep soundly at night,Ne'er do their consciences wake them in a fright,While our good girls toss and they turn-They lay awake for those who will burn.” - Anna Godbersen

54. “A good conscience is eight parts of courage.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

55. “No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.” - Stefan Zweig

56. “This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.” - Joel Salatin

57. “Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.” - Thomas Hardy

58. “I hate what you represent."... "Power without conviction." Isana replied, her tone lifeless, matter of fact. "Ambition without conscience. Decent folk suffer at the hands of those like you.” - Jim Butcher

59. “I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only. Know this at last.” - Charlotte Brontë

60. “The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.” - Barack Obama

61. “Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.” - Henry James

62. “Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.” - W. Somerset Maugham

63. “The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world.” - Victor J. Stenger

64. “I couldn't begin to tell you what terrible trigger for such insanity lies deep in my sub-conscious. Though no doubt some would say that, indeed, it may be some demon of conscience. A deeply buried guilt for some unforgivable depravity. Then again, perhaps not.” - Angel Rosa

65. “Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them.” - Jeff Lindsay

66. “Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.” - Robert Ludlum

67. “That's interesting," Bitterblue said. "You think a conscience requires fear?” - Kristin Cashore

68. “All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.” - Donald Miller

69. “... what you think is right isn't the same as knowing what is right.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

70. “Wounds sustained for the sake of conscience carry their own balsam with the blow.” - Walter Scott

71. “No," said Father. "Just do the best you can and don't let it worry you. In that way you'll have a clear conscience and a tranquil heart.” - Carol Ryrie Brink

72. “I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.” - Octavia E. Butler

73. “I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.” - Octavia E. Butler

74. “I have a different idea of elegance. I don't dress like a fop, it's true, but my moral grooming is impeccable. I never appear in public with a soiled conscience, a tarnished honor, threadbare scruples, or an insult that I haven't washed away. I'm always immaculately clean, adorned with independence and frankness. I may not cut a stylish figure, but I hold my soul erect. I wear my deeds as ribbons, my wit is sharper then the finest mustache, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs.” - Edmond Rostand

75. “The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.” - Harold Edmund Stearns

76. “It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.” - John Henry Newman

77. “Whenever the conviction of God’s Spirit comes there is the softening of the whole nature to obey; but if the obedience is not instant there will come a metallic hardening and a corrupting of the guidance of God.” - Oswald Chambers

78. “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.” - Criss Jami

79. “يا للإنسان! أيذبح في ذاكرته ذكريات لا يقوى على احتمالها؟ كنت أحسب أن فاقدي الضمير تتحجّر قلوبهم، فلا يشعرون بتأنيبه. فإذا الأمر مختلف. وإذا الإنسان أعجز من أن يقتل ضميره، فيقتل الذاكرة!” - إميل حبيبي

80. “You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.” - Philip Roth

81. “Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.” - Nick Hornby

82. “Major, I do not know why God does the things He does, but I believe you have the same duty to God as you have always had: to follow the right path, to live your life with a clear conscience.” - Jeff Shaara

83. “Gamache watched the old poet. He knew what was looming behind the Mountain. What crushed all before it. The thing the Hermit most feared. The Mountain most feared.Conscience....Which is why, Gamache knew, it was vital to be aware of actions in the present. Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you.And found you ...Who wouldn't be afraid of this?” - Louise Penny

84. “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.” - Susan Sontag

85. “É bom quando nossa consciência sofre grandes ferimentos, pois isso a torna mais sensível a cada estímulo. Penso que devemos ler apenas livros que nos ferem, que nos afligem. Se o livro que estamos lendo não nos desperta como um soco no crânio, por que perder tempo lendo-o? Para que ele nos torne felizes, como você diz? Oh Deus, nós seríamos felizes do mesmo modo se esses livros não existissem. Livros que nos fazem felizes poderíamos escrever nós mesmos num piscar de olhos. Precisamos de livros que nos atinjam como a mais dolorosa desventura, que nos assolem profundamente – como a morte de alguém que amávamos mais do que a nós mesmos –, que nos façam sentir que fomos banidos para o ermo, para longe de qualquer presença humana – como um suicídio. Um livro deve ser um machado para o mar congelado que há dentro de nós” - Franz Kafka

86. “You can pray and fight at the same time, Corporal. Especially if you learn how before things get rough. It’s important to have a philosophy of life . . . and of death.” - Henry V. O'Neil

87. “C.S. Lewis said that conscience is nothing more than the voice of God within our souls; the bridge that links the creature to the creator” - Dinesh D'Souza

88. “Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable.” - Fulton J. Sheen

89. “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!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

90. “I cannot kill someone, he thought.” - Lois Lowry

91. “He shrugged, "...my conscience rests easiest if I do only what I see as best in the moment...” - Anihyr Moonstar

92. “A standing prick hath no conscience. And if that standing prick is attached to Bruce Robertson then it hath less than no conscience. You can't afford a conscience in this life, that has become a luxury for the rich and a social ball and chain for the rest of us. Even if I wanted one, which I certainly do not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea as how to go about getting one.” - Irvine Welsh