But no man has a monopoly of conscience.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

For nine years, till the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

But no man has a monopoly of conscience.

We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.

English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

But the mind travels far - and mysteriously - in sleep.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many.

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.

A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

I think that if there are positions that you can't argue... then the responsibility is probably to resign. If one's own conscience is opposed to the requirements and responsibilities of the job, then it's time to leave the job.

We cannot appeal to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

Maybe I'll learn how, but the only thing I can do is turn down parts that would hurt my conscience.

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it.

It wouldn't sit easily on one's conscience that you had been warned and there could be danger, but nevertheless you went ahead and said let's dispense these drugs.

Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Living with a conscience is like driving with the brakes on.

No, moral conscience is one thing, the law is another. We have to hold onto this difference.

God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.

To admit there is no god is to provide free license to pillage and rape with clear conscience.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.

No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He's got to put all his talent and feeling into them!

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.