I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.

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

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.

Remorse. Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia.

If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts.