Oscar Wilde Quotes About Conscience

• Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

  Oscar Wilde

  Mistake, Character, Past

  Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Penny Dreadfuls: Tales of Horror: Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.719, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

• Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

  Oscar Wilde

  Vanity, Sin, Vain

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (with an Essay by Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly)”, p.65, Mondial

• The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.

  Oscar Wilde

  Memories, Men, Poor

• Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

  Oscar Wilde

  Names, Cowardice, Basil

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 1 (1891)

• Conscience makes egotists of us all.

  Oscar Wilde

  Conscience

  by Oscar Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, Lulu.com

• There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

  Oscar Wilde

  Taken, Moving, Passion

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Story of a Fashionable Young Man Who Sells His Soul for Eternal Youth and Beauty (Beloved Books Edition)”, p.212, Lulu Press, Inc

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