Johann Gottlieb Fichte Quotes

Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.

Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.

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

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

Beware! Don't allow yourself to do what you know is wrong, relying on the thought, Later I will repent and ask God's forgiveness.

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.

There is no man that is knowingly wicked but is guilty to himself; and there is no man that carries guilt about him but he receives a sting in his soul.

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

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

Name your nation-state, or tribe or party - you have to rationalize what you're doing. You have to go to sleep at night. Does Dick Cheney sleep at night? Does he sleep like a baby?

All a man can betray is his conscience.

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

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

All sin and all crime comes from the same thing: 'I decided. I decided this was okay.'

In truth, there is no such thing as a "sinner" for no-one can be sinned against-least of all me.

Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

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.

Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.

He [man] knows that when he is not what he ought to be; when he does what he ought not to do; or omits what he ought to do, he is chargeable with sin

he was trying to convince himself that he wasn't guilty.