"Voice of conscience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to do him justice, had any such intentions. Most men are incapable of plots of that nature. If they fall, it is when the voice of conscience is lost in the whirlwind of passion, and counsel is darkened by the tumultuous pleadings of the heart. Their sin is that they will, most of them, allow themselves to be put in positions favourable to the development ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... inexplicable crime, they had suddenly found themselves in possession of an immense fortune. Perhaps in this wild pursuit of pleasure, in the haste they displayed to satisfy their covetous longings, they hoped to forget or silence the threatening voice of conscience. Such was Mademoiselle Marguerite's conclusion; but she was not long left to undisturbed meditation. By the lieutenant's departure the restrictions which had been placed upon the servants' movements had evidently been removed, for they came ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... secondary origin, these sources of fear have been divinely ordained as means to an end. Such fear could not be divinely inspired if it were not founded on fact. And the fact is, that there is suffering in reserve for evil doers. There is no mistaking the statements of Scripture as well as the voice of conscience ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalised by truthfullest art. With the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still laughed; and when the voice of conscience sounding through Savonarola asked her why, she ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the eternal truths whose source He is, when the beauty of order shall strike all the powers of our soul, and we shall be solely occupied in comparing what we have done with what we ought to have done, then will the voice of conscience resume its force and its empire; then will the pure bliss which is born of self-content, and the bitter regret for self-debasement, distinguish by inexhaustible feelings the fate which each man will have prepared ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... sonnet, or Milton denounced the massacres at Piedmont. While this nation retains a conscience, its poets have a clear right and a clear call to be the voice of that conscience. They may err, of course; they may mistake the voice of party for the voice of conscience: 'Jameson's Ride' and 'The Year of Shame'—one or both—may misread that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by their rightness or wrongness, and again judge them by their merits or defects as literature. Only do not forbid the poet to speak and enforce ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the spirit with which the courts of the Holy Inquisition were inspired. Where in Nature can there be found such lack of proportion between cause and effect, crime and punishment? Have such arguments ever been justified by the voice of conscience? ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... recollection. May none who hear this tale ever have felt as I. A horse driven to fury by a rider armed with barbed spurs, was not more a slave than I to the violent tyranny of my temper. A fiend possessed my soul, irritating it to madness. I felt the voice of conscience within me; but if I yielded to it for a brief interval, it was only to be a moment after torn, as by a whirlwind, away—borne along on the stream of desperate rage—the plaything of the storms engendered ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the Voice of God. I have read how a notorious prisoner, who had been convicted of many serious crimes, was found to have the whole story of our Lord's crucifixion marked upon his breast. How utterly deaf to the voice of conscience that man must have been! Although he bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus, yet he was the ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... reaching effect, for then the sufferings which the spirit will realize in purgatory on account of bad habits and misdeeds will be much more keen than if there is only a slight impression, and in a future life the still small voice of conscience will warn so much more insistently against mistakes which caused sufferings in ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... does not alter the fact that he is the author of it. If this man, for instance, thinks over his worldly affairs on God's holy day, and perhaps in God's holy house, with such an absorption and such a pleasure that he entirely drowns the voice of conscience while he is so doing, and self-inspection is banished for the time, it will not do for him to plead this absence of a distinct and painful consciousness of what his mind was actually doing in the house of God, and upon the Lord's day, as the palliative ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... imbecility and transforms its unhappy victims into maniacs and fools. Intemperance or the use of alcoholic liquors brings a curse upon the morals of all nations, and thereby proves to be a moral curse. It weakens the will and so influences the passions as to hush the voice of conscience and prepare the way for every vice and crime. Then, with all that, let us briefly review a few of the attendant miseries of intemperance that are about us like a swarm of locusts coming as a plague: In the slimy trail of this alcoholic ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... it as the voice of conscience. I left my work-basket and book upon the table, and ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... that uneasiness and apprehension which attended upon the chance of detection, even when the criminal is insensible to the voice of conscience—that vague terror of the consequences of crime, which is often mistaken for remorse at the crime itself. The buoyant air of Campania weighed heavily upon his breast; he longed to hurry from a scene where danger might not sleep eternally with the dead; and, having Ione now in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... said, "is now superfluous. If you had listened to the voice of conscience and heeded the stings of remorse before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... be united to her lover, wholly, sacredly as his own; and yet she was filled with deep grief that the path to the altar would not be hallowed by her father's blessing. Even love, which spoke so loudly and powerfully in her heart, could not silence the warning voice of conscience—that voice which again and again threatened her with sin and sorrow, disgrace and shame. Yet Elise, in the warmth and passion of her heart, sought to excuse herself, and in the pride of her wounded filial love said to herself: "My father does not ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... become the chairman of a Laundry Company with seventeen different branches. It was a great position. Had I any right to refuse it? If I did not take it, I felt sure that somebody else would. Was anybody else as good as I was? Truth compelled me to answer in the negative. The voice of conscience said: "Take a good thing when you see it. People have lost fortunes by ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... slaves. He who is lost is the innocent, well-educated young man who, without remorse, unconscious of his own degradation, takes advantage of a human being who is made a slave for him, and, moreover, covers her with contempt, without hearing the voice of conscience which admonishes him: "Why beholdest thou the mote which is in thy brother's eye? Cast out the beam which is in thine own eye." This man, who seeks, perhaps, to protect his own body from disastrous consequences, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... voice against their inclinations and former ways, and so create more trouble to them; while, as now they enjoy more quiet within, so long as the cry of their self-will and biassed judgments is so loud, that they cannot well hear the still and low voice of conscience. ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... of such maxims must be on the public in general and the uneducated mind in particular. Under its influence a nation may become, in times of war, dishonourable and treacherous, may be dragged from one abyss of degradation to another, deeper than the last, until all self-respect is gone and the voice of conscience is silenced ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... measure, to glorify him too. She did not doubt, but she hesitated, and trembled. The song of the birds and the flow of the water mocked her hesitancy and difficulty. But Elizabeth was honest; and though she trembled she would not and could not disobey the voice of conscience which set before her one clear, plain duty. She was in great doubt whether to stand or to kneel; she was afraid of being seen if she knelt; she would not be so irreverent as to pray sitting; she rose to her feet, and clasping ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... Fanny—"it is I—not you—that must bear reproach. A word might have saved all. Weak, erring child that I was! Oh! that fatal secret which almost crushed my heart with its burden! Why did I not listen to the voice of conscience ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... asked myself that, and I felt as if I could not. Through them, by means of them, I felt as if I might attain to something wonderful—terrible perhaps, but wonderful. I felt as if I were approaching the threshold of absolute truth. A voice within me whispered, 'Go no further.' Was it the voice of conscience? I did not heed it. Something irresistible urged me forward. I thrust away from me with a sort of crude mental violence the haunting thought. And when the darkness ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... bed, Nelly, for the first time in her life, tossed about, unable to sleep. All sorts of possibilities of detection and disgrace occurred to her, and, above all, the voice of conscience told her she was little better than a thief. She had knelt down to say the simple prayer she had been first taught by Miss Preston, "O Lord, take away my sin, and make me Thy child, for Jesus Christ's sake;" but indulged sin had come between her and the Father to whom ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... true that the New Testament says, "Repent, and be converted, and your sins shall be blotted out;" "Believe, and be saved." It is true that if we will believe ourselves forgiven, we shall be forgiven. But how can we believe it, when the inward voice of conscience is always saying that God ought not to forgive us without some reparation made for the injury done to himself, to the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... in the voice of Deerslayer, which touched the girl's feelings; nor did the allusion to her beauty lessen the effect with one who only knew too well the power of her personal charms. Nevertheless, the still, small voice of conscience was not hushed, and it prompted the answer which she made, after giving herself time ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... glory softened the pain in the heart of the man who believed himself to be a murderer and encouraged him to hope that it might eventually pass away. He played recklessly but successfully, for he was a transient favorite of the fickle goddess. When gambling lost its power to drown the voice of conscience, there was the race, the play and the wine cup! To each of them appealing in turn, he went whirling madly around the outer circles of the great maelstrom in which so many brilliant youths were ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... scarcely more pleasurable than they are salutary to us. Disengaged for the time from every worldly anxiety, we pass in review before our own selves, and in the solitude of our own hearts are we judged. That still small voice of conscience, unheard and unlistened to amidst the din and bustle of life, speaks audibly to us now; and while chastened on one side by regrets, we are sustained on the other by some approving thought; and with many a sorrow ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... bodily senses, we behold with joy the supreme Being and the eternal truths which flow from him; when all the powers of our soul are alive to the beauty of order and we are wholly occupied in comparing what we have done with what we ought to have done, then it is that the voice of conscience will regain its strength and sway; then it is that the pure delight which springs from self-content, and the sharp regret for our own degradation of that self, will decide by means of overpowering feeling what ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... said the quiet voice at my side, not much louder than the voice of conscience, which was ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... apprehension of personal evil. For, although it be the lowest of its functions, it is a function of conscience, not only to say to me, 'It is wrong to do what is wrong,' but to say, too, 'If you do wrong, you will have to bear the consequences.' I believe that a part of the instinctive voice of conscience is the declaration, not only of a law, but of a Lawgiver, and that part of its message to me is not only that sin is a transgression of the law, but that 'the wages of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... once taken seemed to afford him unusual pleasure, as it does with us all when the voice of conscience is a monitor that is heeded. He was tramping toward the west, and now that the matter was decided in his own mind, he paused again, as if he could better debate other matters that must in the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... the ranks of the old defenders of the country." The appeal was entirely vague: it did not specify whether they would serve against the nominal enemy, Russia, or the real enemy, Napoleon. Pondering this weighty question, as did all good patriots, Steffens heard, in the watches of the night, the voice of conscience declare: "Thou must declare war against Napoleon." At his early morning lecture on Physics, which was very thinly attended, he told the students that he would address them at eleven on the call for volunteers. That lecture was ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... hope that I have said enough, not to show that the words are true—that is a very poor thing to do, if that were all that I aimed at—but to bring them home to some of our hearts and consciences. I pray God to impress the conviction that, although there be in us all the voice of conscience, which all of us more or less have tried at intervals to follow; yet in the main it abides for ever true—and it is true, my dear brethren, about you—a Christless life is a life under the dominion of tyrannous desires. Ask yourself what I cannot ask for you, Is it I? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... king hastily, for he felt the voice of conscience murmuring softly in his heart, that Monsieur was not altogether wrong, "what I have done, and what I have said, has been only for your happiness. I was told that you complained of a want of confidence and attention on Madame's part, and I did not wish your ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "Calvin, that learned and righteous man," they said, "it is he whom we would have as the minister of the Lord." Yet he did not willingly return; he preferred his quiet life at Strasburg, but obeyed the voice of conscience. On the 13th of September, 1541, he returned to his penitent congregation, and was received by the whole city with every demonstration of respect; and a cloth cloak was given him as a present, which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... self-preservation is to our physical existence, a powerful principle of creation, preservation and of renewed life (I. Thessal., 4, 11, seq.).(106) Then there is the incentive of the demand of God's voice within us, the voice of conscience, whether we call it, in philosophic outline "the adumbration of the ideas of equity, right, benevolence, of perfection and inner freedom," or, framing our lives in accordance with them, the striving after the Kingdom of God.(107) It matters not, how much the image of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... lusts retain faith and a good conscience, a thing impossible with those who fail to resist sin and thus violate their conscience and overthrow their faith. If you persist in that which is evil regardless of the voice of conscience, you cannot say, nor believe, that you have God's favor. So then, the Christian necessarily must not yield ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... do you wish to choose for your tzar? I am too feeble to speak long. Dmitri, though in his cradle, is none the less your legitimate sovereign. If you are deaf to the voice of conscience you must answer ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Uncle in happier ways than that, I hope, for you, too, must have a high ideal and find her and be happy," she said, resolving to be true to the voice of conscience, not be swayed by ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... unsurpassed in modern literature. In his analysis of character and motive he seems to set before us our own weak selves laid bare, until his voces populi become voces animi, the voice of the people speaking unpleasantly like the voice of conscience. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... their force, and resolved to repent; but the deadly wave seemed to have retired to gather new force, and again swept over her and prostrated her lower than "the beasts that perish." There can be no more effectual barrier against the voice of conscience, the powerful influence of natural affection, and the strivings of the blessed Spirit of God, than the ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... to connect the voice of Conscience with the stillness of midnight. But I think we wrong that innocent hour. It is that terrible "NEXT MORNING," when reason is wide awake, upon which remorse fastens its fangs. Has a man gambled away his all, or shot his friend in a duel—has he committed a crime ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nor friendship, nor music, nor voice of conscience, nor voice of praise, nor ideals, nor any other earthly thing could stand this day against the evil that was in him. The parson had scarce gone away through the misty beams before he sprang up ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... mass. By the same priest D'Andelot sent a submissive message to the king, to which the bearer, we have reason to believe, attributed a meaning quite different from that which D'Andelot had intended to convey. The noble prisoner was at once released; but the voice of conscience, uniting with that of his faithful friends, soon led him to repent bitterly of his temporary, but scandalous weakness. From this time forward he resumes the character of the intrepid defender of the Protestant doctrines—a character of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... secure. We may safely esteem that this is the culminating struggle of his life. We may well understand the solemn pause that ensues, the retirement to solitude, there to review the position before the only court of appeal that remains to him,—that inward voice of conscience, that inward sense of right, which is the immediate presence of God within. But we never doubt what the decision will be. "I must obey God rather than man; I cannot recognise that this voice—even of God's vicegerent—is ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... Motte, closing her ears to the voice of conscience and discretion, and listening only to the pleadings of a reckless and fatal ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... been gentle, lowly, meek, And the small voice of conscience heard? When passion tempted me to speak, Have I repressed the ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... repentance, remorse; regret &c. 833. self-reproach, self-reproof, self-accusation, self-condemnation, self- humiliation; stings of conscience, pangs of conscience, qualms of conscience, prickings of conscience[obs3], twinge of conscience, twitch of conscience, touch of conscience, voice of conscience; compunctious visitings of nature[obs3]. acknowledgment, confession &c. (disclosure) 529; apology &c. 952; recantation &c. 607; penance &c. 952; resipiscence|!. awakened conscience, deathbed repentance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in past years; now, how has the baneful use of opium thrown a dark cloud over you and your prospects! I would not say any thing needlessly harsh or unkind, but I must be faithful. It is the irresistible voice of conscience. Others may still flatter you, and hang upon your words, but I have another, though a less gracious duty to perform. I see a brother sinning a sin unto death, and shall I not warn him? I see him perhaps on the borders of eternity; in effect, despising his Maker's law, and yet indifferent ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of these letters, his unhappiness lasted sometimes for a whole day, and it was revived many times during the week; but philosophy enabled him to resist the voice of conscience still a little while, and even a letter relating the death of his grandmother did not decide his departure. It seemed at first to have decided him, and he told all his friends that he was leaving with the next caravan. But of ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore |
