"Voice of conscience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compare with the haphazard passage from Pepys a bit of narrative that is artistically patterned. Here is the conclusion to Stevenson's story of "Markheim." The hero, having slain a dealer in his shop on Christmas day, spends a long time alone, ransacking the dealer's effects and listening to the voice of conscience. He is interrupted by a ringing of the door-bell. The dealer's maid ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... from the stings of conscience, is like trying to silence a buzzing in the head by standing beside Niagara thundering in our ears. They used to beat the drums when a martyr died, in order to drown his testimony; and so foolish men seek to silence the voice of conscience by letting passions shout their loudest. It needs no words to demonstrate the incurable folly of such conduct; but alas, it takes many words far stronger than mine to press home the folly upon men. The condition of such a half-awakened conscience is very critical if it is soothed by any ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... hangings were suspended in many places and the altars twinkling with lighted candles added much gilding and colour to the aisles. All this barbarous crowding of colour and ornament, all this splendour of a ritual that appealed to an age capable of stilling the voice of conscience with an absolution obtainable for a few pence has passed away, but the vast building remains to tell of the reality of endeavour of ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... better feelings were soon checked for want of strength to follow up the generous suggestion. The awe with which Roque beheld his master, and the dread of the results which his disclosure might produce in the mind of the victim, powerfully contributed to silence the voice of conscience. Then he hoped that the marriage once over, measures might be taken for the security and comfort of Theodora; and finally he fondly admitted the hope, or rather forced his rebellious mind to encourage it, that Gomez Arias would relent at the sight of the unhappy girl, and that he would then ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... lesson to heart. We all of us do evil things with regard to which it is not hard for us to bribe or to silence our memories and our consciences. The hurry and bustle of daily life, the very weakness of our characters, the rush of sensuous delights, may make us blind and deaf to the voice of conscience; and we think that all chance of the evil deed rising again to harm us is past. But some trifle touches the hidden spring by mere accident; as in the old story of the man groping along a wall till his finger happens to fall upon one inch of it, and immediately the concealed door flies open, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... The voice of conscience speaks in duty done; and without its regulating and controlling influence, the brightest and greatest intellect may be merely as a light that leads astray. Conscience sets a man upon his feet, while his will holds him upright. Conscience is the moral governor ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... justify all self-sacrifice; which shall make us love man by the new consecrations it sheds on his life and destiny; which shall force through the thin partitions of conventialism and expediency; vindicate the majesty of reason; give new power to the voice of conscience, and new vitality to human affection; soften and elevate passion; guide enthusiasm in a right direction; and speak out in the high language of men ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... broke they took to their boats, and abandoned the vessel to preserve their lives. But there was no repentance in the pirates; along with the night and the winds went the voice of conscience, and they thought no more of what had passed. They stood upon the beach gazing at the wreck, and the first thought of Soto, was to sell it, and purchase another vessel for the renewal of his atrocious pursuits. With the marked decision of ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... he is, he bids you show By what you prove it, or by what you know. Oh, reas'ning worm! who questions thus of Him That lives in all, and moves in every limb, Must with himself in very strangeness dwell, Has never heard the voice of Conscience tell Of right and wrong, and speak in louder tone Than tropick thunder of that Holy One, Whose pure, eternal, justice shall requite The deed of wrong, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... dead. "But you are sworn to her in death," commented the voice of Conscience. "Would you rob the living of ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... battle against endless evil. God was everywhere around man, and the universe was just the expression of His will—a will inexorably bent on the good, so that evil could not prevail; but God was not within man, except as a voice of conscience issuing imperatives and threats. An infinite duty was laid upon a finite being, and its weight made him break out into a ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... by the spirit of his hero, be merely the bard and not the fighter, and no man in Ireland intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy and still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in words ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... one of those dogs that cannot resist temptation, and although she has often been whipped and scolded for massacring rabbits, never listens to the voice of conscience. In fact, she hardly seems as if she could help doing so, and appears to think, like the naughty boy of the story, that, in spite of the beating, the fun was too ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... virtue in some high-minded men, which enables them to resist the insidious temptations of the bad demon; there is also a stern stability of vice often found in the unfortunate outlaw, which disregards, for a time, the voice of conscience, and spurns the whispered wooing of the good principle, "charm it never so wisely;" yet the real confessions of the hearts of those individuals would show traces enough of the agency of the unseen power to prove their want of title to an exception from the general rule which includes all the sons ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... a soothing sincerity 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 ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... and she often appeared to feel 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 use of ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... human reason, and reminds one 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
... stamping of a horse's hoof at a lumbering trot. Those only whose hopes have been wrought up to a high pitch, and then suddenly cast down, can imagine what I felt at that moment; and yet when I returned to my lonely tent, and lay down on my hard pallet, the voice of conscience told me that the misery I was then undergoing I had fully merited, for the unkind manner in which I had intended to receive her, when for a brief moment I ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... meanest insect dies, And is no hero! heroes dare to live When all that makes life sweet is snatched away." So with my heart, in converse, till the day, In gold and crimson billows, rose and broke, The voice of Conscience, all unwearied, spoke. Love warred with Friendship, heart with Conscience fought, Hours rolled away, and yet the end was not. And wily Self, tricked out like tenderness, Sighed, "Think how one, whose ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a pure home—place all these high gifts on the one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and turbulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrain and fatal to indulge—and between these two opposing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could overhear the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest manhood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymen there are ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... claims of their own, they have their own share of power, and thus man's life is a perpetual conflict with self. If in this conflict the soul, hard-pressed from within and without, does not always end by obeying the voice of conscience, let us hope that He who created us imperfect will not require ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... feeling depressed at the sad parts. Then he thought of Williams and Lawson, and reproached himself for having acted that evening very, very foolishly. Alas! this was not the right term; it was more than foolishness to tamper with the voice of conscience, to violate principles which had been inculcated from childhood, to plot wilful deceit, and act a lie. Instead of saying he had acted foolishly, he should have said, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight Have mercy upon me, O God! Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquities, ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... 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
... 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, locus paenitentiae[Lat], stool of repentance, cuttystool[obs3]. penitent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... faithful advice in the spirit of men who are sailing in common in a boat that is in danger; we speak as do those who love sincerity and cherish the unbroken word. We hope that the President will, with courage, refuse to listen to the speech of evil counsellors and heed the voice of conscience and of honour. We further hope that he will renew his promise to protect the Republic; and will publicly swear that a monarchical system will ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... woman come the day before it is likely enough that Mr. Tebrick would have sent her packing. But the voice of conscience being woken in him by his drunkenness of the night before he was heartily ashamed of his own management of the business, moreover the old woman's words that "it was a shame to let her run about like ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett |
