Conscientiousness Quotes

• Self-discipline, although difficult, and not always easy while combating
  negative emotions, should be a defensive measure. At least we will be able to prevent the advent of negative conduct dominated by negative emotion. That is 'shila', or moral ethics. Once we develop this by familiarizing ourselves with it, along with mindfulness and conscientiousness, eventually that pattern and way of life will become a part of our own life.

  Dalai Lama

  Self, Discipline, Patterns

  63 Copy quote

• Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.

  Immanuel Kant

  Heartfelt, Religion, Sincerity

  23 Copy quote

• Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Witty, Kings

  Strength to Love (1963) ch. 4

  189 Copy quote

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• People high in conscientiousness get better grades in high school and college; they commit fewer crimes; and they stay married longer.

  Paul Tough

  School, College, People

  Paul Tough (2012). “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Vanity, Curiosity, Unhappy

  "Briefe von und an Hegel, Volume 4". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1977.

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• Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .

  Oscar Wilde

  Giving, Facts, Details

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.697, GENERAL PRESS

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• Persons who reach the higher rungs in business management, selling, engineering, religious work, writing, acting, and in every other pursuit get there by following conscientiously and continuously a plan for self-development and growth.

  David J. Schwartz

  Religious, Writing, Self

  David J Schwartz (2016). “The Magic of Thinking Big”, p.17, Random House

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• Self-discipline, although difficult, and not always easy while combating negative emotions, should be a defensive measure.

  Dalai Lama

  Self, Discipline, Negative

  17 Copy quote

• I daily examine myself on three points: In planning for others, have I failed in conscientiousness? In intercourse with friends, have I been insincere? And have I failed to practice what I have been taught?

  Confucius

  Practice, Three, Taught

  Confucius (2012). “The Analects”, p.16, Courier Corporation

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• What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

  Paul Tough

  Children, Character, Self Confidence

  Paul Tough (2012). “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Industriousness and conscientiousness are often at odds, because industriousness wants to pick the still sour fruit from the tree,while conscientiousness lets it hang there too long, until it falls and bruises.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fall, Odds, Long

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• His constant fight is with the Nafs (self-interest), the root of all disharmony and the only enemy of man. By crushing this enemy man gains mastery over himself; this wins for him mastery over the whole universe, because the wall standing between the self and the Almighty has been broken down. Gentleness, mildness, respect, humility, modesty, self-denial, conscientiousness, tolerance and forgiveness are considered by the Sufi as the attributes which produce harmony within one's own soul as well as within that of another.

  Hazrat Inayat Khan

  Crush, Wall, Humility

  48 Copy quote

• The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Art, Boredom, Perfection

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• Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honor.

  Thomas Paine

  Political, Honor, Politics

  Thomas Paine, John P. Kaminski (2002). “Citizen Paine: Thomas Paine's Thoughts on Man, Government, Society, and Religion”, p.47, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Some aim to be deft, others to be laboriously careful. Neither dexterity nor conscientiousness is enough.

  Chai Lu

  Dexterity, Enough, Aim

  8 Copy quote

• Superstitions, and especially the early cultivation of religion, with its "fear of the Lord" and of unknown mysterious agencies, are especially potent in the development of the instinct of fear. Even the early cultivation of morality and conscientiousness, with their fears of right and wrong, often causes psychoneurotic states in later life. Religious, social, and moral taboos and superstitions, associated with apprehension of threatening impending evil, based on the fear instinct, form the germs of psychopathic affections.

  Boris Sidis

  Religious, Agency, Evil

  Boris Sidis (1916). “The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases”

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• Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.

  Erik Erikson

  Children, May, Principles

  Erik H. Erikson (1993). “Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History”, p.70, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.

  Florence King

  Sex, Mean, Race

  23 Copy quote

• Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Rewards, Modesty, Novel

  Erich Maria Remarque (2013). “Three Comrades: A Novel”, p.23, Random House

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• Safe popular freedom consists of four things, the diffusion of liberty, of intelligence, of property, and of conscientiousness, and cannot be compounded of any three out of the four.

  Joseph Cook

  Freedom, Liberty, Three

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• Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Teacher, Children, Military

  Jonathan Kozol (2012). “Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope”, p.10, Crown

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• I write incessantly, I'm very productive, I write for a dozen publications and blogs and websites. A lot of very hardcore political stuff. I write a weekly feature. I express myself. But when time comes to make music [with the] same absolutely unleashing of total honesty zero inhibitions, it just flows like a stream of conscientiousness because I will not be silenced no matter what my point might be.

  Ted Nugent

  Zero, Honesty, Writing

  "Ted Nugent Exclusive All Access Interview Motor City Madman Shutup & Jam P2". Interview with Mark Capuano, music.allaccess.com. July 22, 2014.

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• Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of honor. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labor and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.

  Thomas Paine

  Honor, Poverty, Bitterness

  5 Copy quote