P D James

Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience; that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, he never pretended that it hadn't sounded or that he hadn't heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.

P D James The Boxdale Inheritance

Penelope Fitzgerald

It was during the four years at Edmundthorpe that Wilfred told, or rather implied, his only lie. While Ronnie and he were ambushing each other in the garden they had the bad luck to break off a branch of the flowering Judas tree. Wilfred dared not confess - not for fear of punishment, for there was none at Edmundthorpe, but because the Aunts were so fond of the tree. By bedtime he had still said nothing, and that night there was a storm, which scattered twigs and branches everywhere. All the damage was put down to the wind, but Wilfred's conscience ached.

Penelope Fitzgerald The Knox Brothers

Austin Phelps

Many a doubtful principle in a Christian mind, if once set in the focus of a conscience illumined by the Holy Spirit, would resolve itself into a sin, for which that Christian would turn and look up guiltily to the Master, and then go out and weep bitterly.

The Still Hour p 34

James Montgomery

Conscience the bosom-hell of guilty man
Pelican Island V

Menander

Conscience is a god to all mortals

Monistochoi

Victor Hugo

There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand then heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul ... To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. ... What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his brain and the actions of his life!

Les Miserables

Thomas Hughes

There is always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere, if you'll only listen for it.
From Tom Brown at Oxford

Ezra Hall Gillett

Conscience, true as the needle to the pole points steadily to the pole-star of God's eternal justice, reminding the soul of the fearful realities of the life to come.

Benjamin Franklin

All of these are from Poor Richard's Almanack

 

1737 The nearest way to come at glory, is to do that for conscience which we do for glory.

 

1739 If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on thee.

 

1741 Let no Pleasure tempt thee, no Profit allure thee, no Ambition corrupt thee, no Example sway thee, no Persuasion move thee, to do any thing which thou knowest to be Evil; So shalt thou always jollily: for a good Conscience is a continual Christmas. Adieu.

Tryon Edwards

Conscience is merely our own judgment of the right or wrong of our actions, and so can never be a safe guide unless enlightened by the Word of God.

From A Dictionary of Thoughts

John Crowne

No hell like a bad conscience
Ambitious Statesman, V iii (1679)
Crwone was a dramatist