Conscience
idea · 5 works · 6 mentions · 7 anchored passages
conscience · a good conscience · bad conscience · good conscience · impulses of conscience · moral virtue
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
The inner moral witness whose approval or disquiet, Seneca argues, matters more than concealment from others.
It is our conscience, not our pride, that has set doorkeepers before us;
A good conscience calls in a crowd;
For this reason confidence in lying hidden never comes even to those who do lie hidden, because conscience convicts them and shows them to themselves.
Against Ctesiphon
Personified moral faculty called to witness Aeschines' speech.
Be ye my witnesses, O Earth and Sun, and virtue and Conscience, and Education, by which we distinguish the honorable and the base, that I have heard my country’s call, and have spoken.
Tusculan Disputations
The inward faculty of self-judgement, described as a greater theatre for virtue than any public audience.
Nay, to me at least all things seem more praiseworthy that are done without ostentation and without the people as witness — not that it is to be shunned, for all good deeds wish to be set in the light, but yet there is no greater theatre for virtue than conscience.
Stromata
The inner faculty of moral awareness invoked to regulate conduct toward the weak and as testimony of sincerity.
" For "this is our boast, the testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and sincerity we have known God"—through this small occasion displaying the work of love—"that not in fleshly wisdom, but in the grace of God we have conducted ourselves in the world.
" For the sake of conscience, then, one must abstain from what one must abstain.
Common Sense
The inner moral faculty whose insufficiency necessitates external government
namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world;
For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistably obeyed, Man would need no other lawgiver;