Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

Every man's conscience is vile and depraved / You cannot depend on it to be your guide when it’s you who must keep it satisfied.

Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

You cannot do wrong and feel right. It is impossible!

All a man can betray is his conscience.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

Everybody is grappling with their own moral compass, and that needle, like any needle, can't just stick. It's always floating a little bit, and depending on where you're standing, it's hard to read.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

You can't slice up morals.

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.

What a man calls his 'conscience' is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

I find that people... very few people think that what they're doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they're doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.

Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

Conscience: something that feels terrible when everything else feels well.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

I have learned that a clear conscience, or a legal opinion, does not make you ethically bullet proof.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

It is a wicked thing to be neutral between right and wrong.

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe