Best 786 quotes in «duty quotes» category

Eventually, there is one principle, and one principle alone on which the world is hinged: things will work out the way they should, provided we do what we should.

Every duty that is bidden to wait comes back with seven fresh duties at its back.

Everyone in this world perform their ‘duty’. But when one performs the ‘duty’ and he also intimidates [scolds] someone in the process, he will reincarnate in the animal life form. If he carries out his duties with understanding, he will return to the human life form. And if he performs them with humbleness, he will reincarnate into the celestial world.

Faithfulness in one’s duty can’t replace the need for increase, but the ideal is that be faithful and increase

From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.

Fulfil all your obligations, attend to your daily duties, be attached to nothing, no one – and ever ready to depart when the call comes!

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

giving is a duty not a choice. Giving has no boundaries but it may be done under a noble discretion

His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.

He loved his wife and daughter. It was perhaps a stalwart affection rather than a magnificent obsession, but nonetheless he didn't doubt that if called upon to do so he would sacrifice his own life in a heartbeat for them. And he also knew that there would be no more hankering for something else, something beyond, for the hot slices of colour or the intensity of war or romance. That was all behind him, he had a different kind of duty now, not to himself, not to his country, but to this small knot of a family.

[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for—not his action, but in fact—the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one’s character—driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity.

I did not come into this Army to serve one man, to serve a friend.

Honor is no phantom. Duty doesn't melt away, no matter how much we might wish it to.

How does a person perform nobly in Hell?" I asked her. "You plant flowers," she hissed. "You feed the birds, while they're burning...

However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.

[Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner belonged to] that small army of brave people who made it their duty, without thought of themselves or hope or expectation of reward, to strive for unpopular causes. [Chapman Cohen on the death of noted freethinker and peace advocate Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner]

I cannot, however, but think that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the Duty of Happiness as well as the Happiness of Duty; for we ought to be as cheerful as we can, if only because to be happy ourselves is a most effectual contribution to the happiness of others.

I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.

I don’t know why everyone is still trying to find out whether heaven and hell exist. Why do we need more evidence? They exist here on this very Earth. Heaven is standing atop Mount Qasioun overlooking the Damascene sights with the wind carrying Qabbani’s dulcet words all around you. And hell is only four hours away in Aleppo where children’s cries drown out the explosions of mortar bombs until they lose their voice, their families, and their limbs. Yes, hell certainly does exist right now, at this moment, as I pen this poem. And all we’re doing to extinguish this hellfire is sighing, shrugging, liking, and sharing. Tell me: what exactly does that make us? Are we any better than the gatekeepers of hell?

I don't really believe that people can predict the future,' he admitted. 'People predict the future every day, Stenwold Maker,' she replied, studying the rainbow carefully as the glass panels shifted slightly on the creaking wooded framework. 'If you drop a stone, you may predict that it shall fall. If you know a man to be dishonest, you may predict that he will cheat you. If you know one army is better trained and led, you may predict that it will win the battle.' He could not help smiling at that. 'But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.' 'And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,' she said. 'The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged by necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another.

If God has really done something in Christ on which the salvation of the world depends, and if He has made it known, then it is a Christian duty to be intolerant of everything which ignores, denies, or explains it away.

if adversity and hopeless grief have quite taken away the taste for life; if an unfortunate man, strong of soul and more indignant about his fate than despondent or dejected, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear but from duty, then his maxim has moral content.

I don’t want fame, money, or duty. I want to close my eyes and see your loving beauty.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. [Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]

If I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion.

If it is worthy doing, it worth doing so well.

If it has to be done, take the responsibility to do it.

Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world. Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.

If they had given in to passion, throwing caution to the wind,they would have lost everything.

If we begin to diligently care for the environment, it will greatly improve human health.

If you try to do that which is not ‘our’ duty [the Self’s duty], it will create interference.

If you don’t do what you love, you will never love what you do. And if you don’t love whatever you do, you are likely to be worried anytime a duty is assigned to you concerning that.

In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.

Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.

In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.

I sat down on the arm of my father's empty chair, thinking of sea-view flats in Brighton, of southern girls called Anna or Sophie, and of a misplaced sense of filial duty now half redundant.

In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for ‘Woman.’ En anglais, nous n’avons aucun mot semblable à l’exquise ‘Jouissance!

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone? In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience? To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent. This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted. Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy.

Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?

Islam is not the greatest threat facing Christianity in the west. The biggest threat facing Christianity in the west is Scripture illiterate believers who are asleep while a world waits to here the Gospel...

. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

It is because of the Biblical curse on man's search for knowledge, which has so paralyzed his mind during the past ages, and its detrimental effect upon progress, that makes the Bible the most wicked, the most detestable, the most pernicious, and the most obnoxious book ever published. It has been a curse to the human race. It is the duty of every brave and honest man and woman to do everything in his and her power to destroy the influence of this utterly stupid and vicious book, with its infantile concept of life and its nonsense concerning the universe. It is their duty to do everything within their power to stop its demoralizing and paralyzing influence upon the life of man. We will never achieve intellectual liberty until the wickedness of this book has been discarded with the belief in the flatness of the earth.

I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women's colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle. [From a letter Brooks wrote to her dean, knowing that she would be told to resign if she married, she asked to keep her job. Nevertheless, she lost her teaching position at Barnard College in 1906. Dean Gill wrote that 'The dignity of women's place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.']

I still owed the world a lot of things.

It is a noble responsibility to not back down when you know that you know that you know that you are right.

It is my duty as a free man to read so I'm not blind being lead around by my nose

It is my civic duty to save the next generation from corrupt corporate controlled governments.

It is our responsibility to pray for a peaceful world.

It is one's duty to rebel, but always with humor.

I wish to be buried in Ireland, the country of my adoption a country which I loved, which I have dutifully served, and for which I believe I have sacrificed my life.