Tryon Edwards Quotes

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

A portion of mankind take pride in their vices and pursue their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.

I also felt guilty about the three pens I'd stolen, but only for a second. And since there was no convenient way to give them back, I stole a bottle of ink before I left.

Every man's conscience is vile and depraved / You cannot depend on it to be your guide when it’s you who must keep it satisfied.

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.

The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.

Conscience, the organ of feeling which dominates us and of the opinions which rule us, is presumptuous in the strong, timid in the weak and unfortunate, uneasy in the undecided.

Guilt soon learns to lie.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Do what you know is right, but try not to get caught.

You got to wrestle with your conscience. You got to listen to people. It doesn't come so easy to me that this is right and that's wrong. It's never that simple.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

People with the purest souls are capable of the greatest evils.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

Where there is a choice of two evils, most men take both.