English
Adjective
compunctious
#Pertaining to compunctions, scruples, feelings of guilt.
#:1606 Come, you spirits
#:That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
#:And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
#:Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
#:Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
#:That no compunctious visitings of nature
#:Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
#:The effect and it!
#::� Shakespeare, Macbeth, s:The_Tragedy_of_Macbeth#SCENE_V._Inverness._Macbeth.27s_castle.|Act 1, Scene 5.
#:1796 Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the human breast. What Shakspeare calls �the compunctious visitings of nature� will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation.
#::� Edmund Burke, s:A Letter to a Noble Lord|A Letter to a Noble Lord.
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