Concience of Guilt vs a Guilty Concience

660 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The negative effects of guilt

Conscious of Guilt VS A Guilty Conscience
Conscious and Conscience are two words that may sound the same and be familiar in definition but have two totally separate meanings. The differences are shown in definition and criminal example.
Webster Dictionary defines Conscious as “Possessing knowledge, whether by internal conscious experience, or by external observation; cognizant; aware; sensible.” Webster Dictionary quotes -Milton as saying “Satan had no answer, but stood struck with guilt of his own sin.” Was this a conscious guilt or a guilty conscience? Conscience is defined by Webster Dictionary as “The faculty, power or inward principle which decides as to the character of one’s own actions, purposes, and affections, warning against and condemning that which is wrong, and approving and promoting to that which is right, the moral faculty passing judgments on one’s self; the moral sense.”
Crimes of society, legality and or morality are committed by people every day. In most cases, unless one has a mental illness, these crimes are committed while the perpetrator knowingly does such acts; aware of their thoughts, surroundings and actions. Since the beginning of mankind such crimes have been committed and some of which are viewed as minor, while others have went down in history as heinous, misunderstood, and legendary. One example is Charles Manson; almost everyone can tell you they have heard of him and have a degree of knowledge of the crimes he was charged with, although these events took place in the late 1960’s. The crime was horrific and left the general population in disbelief that anyone could act out or participate in such cruelty. Conscious of the crimes he was charged with, Charles Manson is quoted as saying; “Maybe I s...

... middle of paper ...

...n I was raised;
Rules I did not fear.
Guidelines went un-appraised,
I just laugh and jeer…
My parents tried.
Habitual rebellious acts,
Family morals broken,
The young mind just reacts,
Without a thought of token…
My parents tried.’

‘“Life Infringed”
The door stands ajar for evil to enter.
In my hand, holds the keys of choice.
So I build a perimeter and lock the door.
Becoming deaf to the shrewd incubus voice.
Inside of the walls fear is dead.
Abused prosperity is allowed to abound.
But drafts of reality tend to trespass.
Pulled by gravity of life, I’m left naked and found.’

Given these examples, of conscious guilt with seemingly no guilty conscience and the example of conscious guilt with a guilty conscience, one can see that although the two words are very similar in sound and definition, there are very separate of the two.

Works Cited

Webster dictionary

Show More
Related

  • Guilt In Vera Claythorne

    295 Words  | 1 Pages

    Guilt is one of the most powerful forces known to man. It can drive the average man into a paranoia struck fool, ravenous for stability. Guilt can cause people to cave in from under them, revealing an empty and hollow shell. As children, we are conditioned to feel guilty when we do something wrong. As we get older, we learn that we receive praise and acceptance when we behave properly, or as is expected of us. Because humans have a strong desire to be loved and accepted, we do things in order to receive approval. Vera Claythorne was one of the characters mostly affected by guilt. She would constantly get hysteria attacks because of the guilt she carried. She often imagined Hugo was near. General Macarthur had very strong guilt as well, so

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Guilt In Gary Soto's 'The Pie'

    749 Words  | 2 Pages

    Guilt acts as one of the strongest and most prominent emotions humans feel throughout their lives. Guilt can cause people to help others, push through obstacles, or make friends. Guilt, however, may not stop one from doing amoral actions. This can happen as a result of a perceived bonus outweighing the negative feeling one may experience from completing the action, or a heat of the moment action, where one may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.

    Read More

  • fifth business

    768 Words  | 2 Pages

    There is one human emotion that can paralyse us, lead us to lie both to ourselves and others, to take action that we don't like, and to cripple any rational thought processes. It is self perpetuating if allowed to get out of control. Its side effects are either anger, aggressiveness or fear and reclusiveness. Its symptoms are irrational behaviour, lying, anguish, lack of self-esteem, and in extreme cases, thoughts of suicide. It is guilt. In The Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies, guilt is a reoccurring theme throughout the novel and is a major force in one’s life. Davies demonstrates this by having one character feeling guilt while another who does not.

    Read More

  • Examples Of Guilt In The Crucible

    1500 Words  | 3 Pages

    Everyone knows the feeling. The nagging in the pit of your stomach that makes you rethink your actions. The feeling that makes you nervous, sweaty and scared. Guilt, an emotion that occurs when a person believes that they have violated a moral standard. Imagine a world without guilt. People would feel no remorse in anything they did, no conscience that monitored their actions. It is a powerful feeling that can both hold people back and push them towards action. This strong emotion is portrayed in several very popular pieces of literature. In the novel Macbeth, William Shakespeare shows how Macbeth’s guilt motivates him to make fatal decisions to try and hide his culpability, such as killing the king, killing Banquo and killing Macduff’s family.

    Read More

  • Guilt in the Scarlet Letter

    1566 Words  | 4 Pages

    Guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, whether real or imagined. There are different types of guilt. Guilt can be caused by a physical thing a person did that he isn’t proud of, or wanted to hide, can be something a person imagined he did to someone or something else, or can be caused when a person did something to his God or religion. Everyone at some time in his or her life has a run in with guilt, and it has a different impact on each person. People, who are feeling guilty because of something they did or said, can influence how other people act and feel. Some people are affected worse by guilt than others, for example, Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter. Talked about in The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale, a man with the deepest guilt, was responsible for the moral well-being of his people. He went against his teachings, committed adultery, and left the woman to suffer publicly alone while he stayed like a hero in the town. On the other hand, sometimes the masses are affected by one person’s guilt. He was affected much more by guilt, because he didn’t tell anyone of what he had done. By keeping guilt internalized, a person ultimately ends up hurting himself. More than seventy percent of all things that make people feel guilty are found out later on in their life by other people. Guilt has three categories that it affects the most in people: physical, mental, and spiritual.

    Read More

  • Impact of Guilt on MacBeth

    790 Words  | 2 Pages

    Shakespeare? Guilt is defined as the fact or state of having offended someone or something. Guilt may cause a person to have trouble sleeping and difficulty in relationships with others. The effects of guilt tie into Macbeth with the theme of night

    Read More

  • Free Essays - Isolation in Macbeth

    703 Words  | 2 Pages

    Lady Macbeth and Macbeth have both shown guilt, but at different stages in the play. Isolating guilty feelings only begins to isolate them from the world around them. Macbeth is the first to feel guilt at the begging of the play, but towards the end he has nothing but isolation. Lady Macbeth has both isolation and guilt. In act III , scene two , lines 6 to 9, Lady Macbeth says, " Noughts had all's spent, where our desire is got without content. Tis safer to be that which we destroy". She is describing how the murder of Duncan has made them lose everything but has made them gain nothing. Her guilt has gotten the best of her by act IV, when all she has on her mind is guilt. When Lady Macbeth says in act V. scene two, line 43 to 44, "Heres the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand". She knows the murder is irrevocable, and nothing can be done to erase the deed from her mind.

    Read More

  • Exploring The Theme Of Guilt In The Film Easy-A

    616 Words  | 2 Pages

    Occasionally we ignore the guilt we are feeling because it's something that seems to have no harm to anybody else. For example, in The Scarlet Ibis the kid never thought or realized that he was in a way always putting doodle into danger. He always let his pride cloud his guilt.

    Read More

  • To Consider the Impact of Guilt across the Shakespeare´s Macbeth and J.B. Priestley´s An Inspector Calls

    1776 Words  | 4 Pages

    Both “Macbeth and “An Inspector Calls” by William Shakespeare and J.B. Priestley both explores the impact of guilt on their characters. For Shakespeare whose novel was set in Medieval Times and written in 1606 Jacobean Times, he writes the play for King James 1 of Scotland in order to gain patronage from King. However, Priestley (a socialist) whose novel was 1912 and written in 1945 (the end of WW2), he focuses on a capitalist family in Brumley just to promote the view of socialist to the audience in 1945. Despite the differences of the play, the overall impact of guilt are the same in both play but used in different ways. In this essay I will be focusing on a character in Shakespeare’s play called Lady Macbeth as her character clearly showed guilt at the end of play due to her sleepwalking (unnatural- madness) and dying as she cannot handle her guilt. This could therefore, be compared to Sheila in “An Inspector Calls” because her character has clear similarities to Lady Macbeth as she does not feel any guilt at the beginning but changes to realise her social responsibility and felt guilty at the end of the play. However, some of the characters in “An Inspector calls” does not show any guilt at all for example, Mr and Mrs Birling.

    Read More

  • Guilt and Emtions in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

    764 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” – Voltaire. Guilt is an emotion that comes from believing that you were responsible for a particular mistake (usually the violation of some moral code) whether or not this guilt is accurate. In the novel The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, the main character Amir portrays guilt as being destructive. Amir’s experience leads to him feeling guilty for the rest of his life. This guilt breaks up the relationships he once had, it also affects the people around him. In the novel The Kite Runner, Khlaed uses Amir to show how violence leads to betrayal, then guilt and at some point destroys relationships between people. This is mostly proved in the novel by the impact of violence on Amir which leads him to betray Hassan his only friend, Amir’s reactions towards Hassan by not helping him turns into guilt and it all leads to the turning point for Amir, Hassan, Baba (Amir’s father) and Ali (Hassan’s father).

    Read More

  • Rosenthal's Higher Order Thought Theory

    2137 Words  | 5 Pages

    I will commence by defining what makes a mental state conscious. This will be done aiming to distinguish what type of state we are addressing when we speak of a mental phenomenon and how is it, that can have a plausible explanation. By taking this first approach, we are able to build a base for our main argument to be clear enough and so that we can remain committed to.

    Read More

  • The Guilt Between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth

    1041 Words  | 3 Pages

    You can control guilt or guilt will drive you into madness. In the novel, Macbeth, guilt has taken over two of the main characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but each one responds to it in a different way. Their similarities and differences are quite obvious and both are driven to their actions by this feeling. It will eventually cause both of them a breakdown, affecting their behaviors and resulting them into going through a psychological incapacity.

    Read More

  • Media Distortion of Crime Reports

    1665 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout society there are both individuals and groups of people with a wide range of perceptions about crime and justice. These perceptions are influenced by the media and what the media presents. Media presents crime stories in ways that selectively distort and manipulate public perception, thus creating a false picture of crime. Therefore the media provides us with perceptions and social constructions about our world. Firstly I will be discussing the role of the media in constructing knowledge about crime. I will begin by explaining why the media is important, and go further to explain that media representations construct knowledge of crime and since knowledge about crime is constructed it does not necessarily capture reality in fact crime stories are often sensationalised. I will then link this to my central argument that the media shapes people’s perceptions of crime and how this is important as it can lead to changes in the law. I will then explain what it is that the public or society needs to be aware of when reading and watching media reports about crime. We need to be aware of bias and moral panics that are created by the media and how the media shapes or influence’s public perception through this, it is important for us to be aware of misleading or false crime stories so that we are not swayed by the media in believing what they want us to believe.

    Read More

  • Guiltless Ambition

    1013 Words  | 3 Pages

    What is guilt? Is it the feeling you get when you do something wrong or is it a feeling you only feel when you know what you are doing is wrong and there is nothing you can do to erase what you have done. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the feeling of guilt is not something that is taken lightly. Guilt is felt by virtually every main character throughout the course of the play and is not something that is taken lightly. In Macbeth, other feelings, such as ambition, overshadow guilt but when the guilt gets to be too much, unexpected actions occur that cannot be helped.

    Read More

  • Guilt In Hamlet Essay

    1747 Words  | 4 Pages

    One particular human emotion can cripple humans mentally and physically. It can cause people to do things they do not want to do. It can lead them to twist the truth and lie not only to themselves, but people around them as well. It is something that they cannot hide. It is more like a disease, however, it is better known as guilt. Along with guilt, comes dishonesty, shamefulness, peculiar behavior, and even suicidal thoughts. Guilt is a recurring theme in both Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Every individual will experience guilt sometime in their life, but it is how they cope and handle it that defines who they are. Humans must face the feeling of guilt, accept

    Read More

More about Concience of Guilt vs a Guilty Concience

Open Document