Between the uprightness of my conscience and the hardness of my lot, I know not how either to show respect to my feelings or to the times. The bitterness of my mind urges me at all hazards to speak what I think, whereas the necessity of the times prompts me, however unbecomingly, to keep silence. Good God! Which way shall I turn myself?
Interpretation
This quote expresses the inner conflict between personal conscience and societal obligations.
Thomas Becket reflects on the struggle between staying true to one's own beliefs and emotions versus conforming to the expectations of society. He is torn between the bitterness of his thoughts that compel him to voice his opinions and the pressures of his circumstances that compel him to remain silent, highlighting the difficult choices one faces in life when personal integrity and social responsibilities collide.
In practice
In a speech on moral integrity, one might quote Becket to illustrate the pressures faced when speaking one's mind.
It is important that the Church of London, which has now lost its ruler, should receive for its new bishop a man whose personal merit, attainments in learning, and prudence in managing public business shall not be unworthy of the dignity of that see.
I am ready to die for my Lord, that in my blood the Church may obtain liberty and peace.
The more I loved the king, the more I opposed his injustice until his brow fell lowering upon me. He heaped calumny after calumny on my head, and I chose to be driven out rather than to subscribe.
Could I anticipate the enmity of those for whom I encountered such opposition? If they had been willing, I should have gained the victory. But the head faints when it is abandoned by the other members. If they had been wise they would have seen that in attacking me they were attacking their own privileges and serving princes to their own servitude.
Whosoever wisely examines the works of God will speedily discover what is next to be done.
The rashness of the persecutor hath overspread the rights of the persecuted so that punishment is awarded to him that has gained the victory, the inglorious triumphs, and the man who deserved bonds has carried off the prize.
And I too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
I wish to go on living even after my death.
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,_x000D_ And out of the caverns of rain,_x000D_ Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,_x000D_ I arise and unbuild it again.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
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