Seared Conscience Quotes

The conscience leads a person away from that which is harmful, and toward what is beneficial. Nerve endings in a person's fingers help prevent their fingers from getting seared; however, if those endings are damaged and a person has no sensitivity to heat, their fingers could catch on fire without the person being aware. In the same way a person's conscience can be seared so that it has no more sensitivity. ~ Henry Hon

When a person denies his conscience for too long, it can become seared. That person becomes susceptible to receiving and accepting all sorts of harmful and evil things. This is true for both believers and unbelievers. A seared conscience will open a person up to demonic spirits and activities. ~ Henry Hon

Something's still wrong
the same thing that was wrong forty years ago. A malignancy, a tumor, slowly growing in someone's heart. A conscience that's seared. ~ Heather Day Gilbert

In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths, estimated fortunately to make up only 1 to 4 percent of the population. The products of the opposing two vectors in natural selection are hardwired in our emotions and reasoning, and cannot be erased. Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox, or spider, for example, whose traits were born solely of individual selection, or a worker ant, whose social traits were shaped entirely by group selection. ~ Edward O. Wilson

Integrity is the best of all protectors ... we cannot be more secure than when fortified by a good conscience. ~ John Calvin

I don't remember ever being see-saw, when I'd made my mind up that a thing was wrong. It takes the taste out o' my mouth for things, when I know I should have a heavy conscience after 'em. I've seen pretty clear, ever since I could cast up a sum, as you can never do what's wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you can ever see. It's like a bit o' bad workmanship
you never see th' end o' the mischief it'll do. And it's a poor look-out to come into the world to make your fellow creatures worse off instead o' better. ~ George Eliot

A clean and sensitive conscience, a steady and scrupulous integrity in small things as well as large, is the most valuable of all possessions, to a nation as to an individual. ~ Henry Van Dyke

Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves. ~ Iris Murdoch

The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely. ~ Selma Fraiberg

A bow has no conscience: it is a prolongation of the hand and desire of the archer. It can serve to kill or to meditate. Therefore, always be clear about your intentions. A bow is flexible, but it has its limits. Stretching it beyond its capacity will break it or exhaust the hand holding it. Therefore, try to be in harmony with your instrument and never ask more than it can give. ~ Paulo Coelho

His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, strained nerves, and cowering flesh were afraid of the drowned man. Conscience played no part in his terrors, and he had not the slightest regret about killing Camille; in his moments of calm, when the spectre was not present, he would have committed the murder over again had he thought his interests required it. ~ Emile Zola

Conscience gets a lot of credit that really belongs to cowardice. ~ Evan Esar

The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshiping Almighty God agreebly to their conscience, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights. ~ George Washington

However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience. ~ J.D. Salinger

At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy! ~ Victor Hugo

Leaders with principles are less likely to get bullied or pushed around because they can draw clear lines in the sand ... The softest pillow is a clear conscience. - Narayana Murthy, founder and CEO, Infosys ~ Bill George

today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is
almost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensible
to the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clear
conscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselves
to death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – that
On the Genealogy of Morality
42
48 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.
49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4.
50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7.
is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-human
proposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as people
say, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act out
a 'demonstration' of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is what
the oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment,
too, has such very strong festive aspects! – ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Great Being unseen, but all-present, who in his beneficence desires only our welfare, watches the struggle between good and evil in our hearts, and waits to see whether we obey his voice, heard in the whispers of conscience, or lend an ear to the Spirit Evil, which seeks to lead us astray. Rough and steep is the path indicated by divine suggestion; mossy and declining the green way along which temptation strews flowers. Then conscience whispers, "Do what you feel is right, obey me, and I will plant for you firm footing. ~ Charlotte Bronte

She would never cross a line she didn't want to again. Not because of something as transient as a conscience, but because of something more concrete. Resolve. ~ Rebecca Schaeffer

I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience. ~ Albert Einstein

We cheat ourselves in order to enjoy a calm conscience without possessing virtue. ~ Lambert Of Maastricht

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

His philosophy of life had been that we only live once.
Now there had matured in him the sense of another truth about himself and the world: that we have only one conscience - and that a crippled conscience is as irretrievable as a lost life. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better. ~ Robert Redford

As long as the ego overcomes the heart of a man, evil will always exist, and the enemies of God will continue to multiply and thrive. If a tree is bearing bad fruit, you do not destroy the tree by cutting off its branches or eliminating its fruit, but by destroying its roots. I want you to look at the world as this poisoned tree. Even if we eliminate our enemies today, we will create new ones tomorrow. The solution is very simple and this formula is written in all your holy books. LOVE IS THY ANSWER. The strongest weapon to destroy the snakes of hate and evil is LOVE. PURE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. However, to be able to emit the right frequency of love, you must succeed daily in your own personal battle of good versus evil: heart (conscience) vs. mind (ego). Once you learn how to use your heart to embrace all living things as you do your own reflection, and use your heart to detect truths and dictate your actions, your heart will not be fully activated to LOVE. Where there is LOVE, there will remain Truth and LIGHT. Take away the LOVE, and you will always remain in the dark. ~ Suzy Kassem

Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash - he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed "Satanic forces," he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world's greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words.

But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word "Jew" is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler. ~ Mark Riebling

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul. ~ Joseph Joubert

Daddy says every person on earth is born iwth a device that lets them know right from wrong. Some call it their conscience, others say it's their inner voice; he calls his a gift from God. I don't know what to call mine, but I do know it lives in my belly. ~ Toni Teepell

What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

One faerie - and then we were free. Just on more swing of my arm.
And maybe one more after that - maybe one more swing, up and inward and into my own heart. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Are you angry? Be angry at your sins, beat your soul, afflict your conscience, but strict in judgement and a terrible punisher of your own sins. This is the benefit of anger, wherefore God placed it in us. ~ Saint John Chrysostom

Christ can rid you of inner conflict. Man without God is always torn between two urges. His nature prompts him to do wrong, and his conscience urges him to do right. ~ Billy Graham