Literary notes about Conscience (AI summary)
Literary authors employ "conscience" as a multifaceted metaphor for the inner voice that regulates moral judgment and self-awareness. In some works it serves as a personal measure of guilt or integrity, as seen when characters awaken to the weight of a clear or troubled conscience [1], [2], [3]. In others, it is presented as a moral compass, an essential guide to right action, whether it be the sincere insistence on personal accountability [4], [5], [6] or a source of internal conflict in questioning duty and liberty [7], [8], [9]. Its use ranges from the philosophical and religious admonitions to the playful or ironic, evidencing both the burden of remorse and the relief of moral certainty [10], [11], [12]. Authors thereby illuminate how conscience underpins human behavior by mapping an internal landscape that both condemns and comforts.
- Presently he could be drunk at dawn, yet not feel particularly wretched in his conscience—or in his stomach—when he awoke at eight.
— from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis - It’s nothing, sir, so long as there’s health and a clear conscience.”
— from Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy - A few days before she had done a dreadful thing, and it weighed upon her conscience.
— from Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy by Louisa May Alcott - You did not think I should start at the first word from you, and you merely wrote to relieve your conscience.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Sir Thomas had appealed to her reason, conscience, and dignity.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - The voice of conscience, too, was heard reminding the good man that he was not altogether innocent.
— from Phaedo by Plato - They talk of duty, conscience—I don’t want to say anything against duty and conscience;—but the point is, what do we mean by them?
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - He then could tolerate no such thing as liberty of conscience, or freedom of thought, or the right to differ with him in religious belief.
— from The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors; Or, Christianity Before Christ by Kersey Graves - Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
— from The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I - Then a pure and good conscience shall more rejoice than learned philosophy.
— from The Imitation of Christ by à Kempis Thomas - A prick of conscience strikes me as a sort of "evil eye."
— from Ecce Homo by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - You may think what you like, but I desire now to do all I can to efface that impression and to show that I am a man of heart and conscience.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
