37 uses
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Definition
feeling or appraisal of having personally behaved in a morally right or wrong manner
- Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.Book 8 — Sunset and Sunrise (7% in)
- —she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse.Book 1 — Miss Brooke (19% in)
- She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's Progress."Book 1 — Miss Brooke (27% in)
- But there are oddities in things," continued Mr. Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could for his niece on this occasion.Book 1 — Miss Brooke (30% in)
- How will you like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you, and you with a bad conscience and an empty pocket?Book 1 — Miss Brooke (41% in)
- His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without any trouble.Book 1 — Miss Brooke (57% in)
- She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience.Book 1 — Miss Brooke (70% in)
- You have a conscience of your own, I suppose.Book 2 — Old and Young (17% in)
- But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's.Book 2 — Old and Young (25% in)
- Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire.Book 2 — Old and Young (45% in)
- "Confound their petty politics!" was one of his thoughts for three mornings in the meditative process of shaving, when he had begun to feel that he must really hold a court of conscience on this matter.Book 2 — Old and Young (54% in)
- I should vote against my conscience if I voted against Mr. Tyke—I should indeed.Book 2 — Old and Young (59% in)
- Tyke's opponents have not asked any one to vote against his conscience, I believe," said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner of fluent speech, whose glittering spectacles and erect hair were turned with some severity towards innocent Mr. Powderell.Book 2 — Old and Young (59% in)
- To have reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been a show of persistent anger which Dorothea's conscience shrank from, seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty.Book 2 — Old and Young (78% in)
- Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather ashamed, imagining from Dorothea's silence that he had offended her still more; and having also a conscience about plucking the tail-feathers from a benefactor.Book 2 — Old and Young (83% in)
- The Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Naumann declared himself to be dissatisfied with—he could not, in conscience, engage to make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the arrangement was conditional.Book 2 — Old and Young (92% in)
- In fact, it is probable that but for Mary's existence and Fred's love for her, his conscience would have been much less active both in previously urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as directly and simply as he could.Book 3 — Waiting for Death (15% in)
- My own money buys me nothing but an uneasy conscience.Book 4 — Three Love Problems (48% in)
- Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them.Book 4 — Three Love Problems (67% in)
- It seems to me, a loss which falls on another because we have done right is not to lie upon our conscience.Book 4 — Three Love Problems (79% in)
- Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents—fiddlestick!Book 5 — The Dead Hand (35% in)
- The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims.Book 5 — The Dead Hand (35% in)
- Lydgate's ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an ill-satisfied conscience.Book 5 — The Dead Hand (63% in)
- "I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit," said Dorothea; "I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off."Book 5 — The Dead Hand (64% in)
- His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active when the yoke of life ceases to gall them.Book 5 — The Dead Hand (80% in)
- That depends on your conscience, Fred—how far you have counted the cost, and seen what your position will require of you.Book 5 — The Dead Hand (81% in)
- He was rising to do what Raffles suggested, when the latter said, lifting up his finger as if with a sudden recollection— "I did have another look after Sarah again, though I didn't tell you; I'd a tender conscience about that pretty young woman.Book 5 — The Dead Hand (99% in)
- Gentlemen, if I had less of a conscience, I should not wish you to bid high for this lot—I have a longing for it myself.Book 6 — The Widow and Wife (69% in)
- But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less adapts himself.Book 6 — The Widow and Wife (84% in)
- Night and day, while the resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him, he was thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust—by what sacrifice he could stay the rod.Book 6 — The Widow and Wife (84% in)
- But for the urgency of conscience and the knowledge that I am before the bar of One who seeth not as man seeth, I should be under no compulsion to make the disclosure which has been my object in asking you to come here to-night.Book 6 — The Widow and Wife (85% in)
- "That mother became my wife," said Bulstrode, and then paused a moment before he added, "you have a claim on me, Mr. Ladislaw: as I said before, not a legal claim, but one which my conscience recognizes.Book 6 — The Widow and Wife (86% in)
- His conscience was soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which seemed just then like an angel sent down for his relief.Book 7 — Two Temptations (78% in)
- ...habitually assumed the attitude of a reprover—that God had disowned him before men and left him unscreened to the triumphant scorn of those who were glad to have their hatred justified—the sense of utter futility in that equivocation with his conscience in dealing with the life of his accomplice, an equivocation which now turned venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie:—all this rushed through him like the agony of terror which fails to kill, and leaves the ears...Book 7 — Two Temptations (96% in)
- I affect no niceness of conscience—I have not found any nice standards necessary yet to measure your actions by, sir.Book 7 — Two Temptations (98% in)
- Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.Book 8 — Sunset and Sunrise (7% in)
- The sharp little woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these opposing "bests," and of her griefs and satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her old friend whose faults she would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.Book 8 — Sunset and Sunrise (13% in)
There are no more uses of "conscience" in Middlemarch.
Typical Usage
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