Quotes About Duty

If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred and all duty violated.

We speak much of the duty of making others happy. No day should pass, we say, on which we do not put a little cheer into some discouraged heart, make the path a little smoother for someone’s tired feet, or help some fainting robin unto its nest again. This is right. We cannot put too great emphasis upon the duty of giving happiness and cheer to others. But it is no less a duty that we should be happy and cheerful ourselves.

One single vision fills all minds: that of our independence endangered. One single duty imposes itself upon our wills: the duty of stubborn resistance.

No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.

What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

To his enemies the householder must be a hero. Them he must resist. That is the duty of the householder. He must not sit down in a corner and weep, and talk nonsense about non-resistance. If he does not show himself a hero to his enemies he has not done his duty.

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

I fell asleep and dreamed that life was only Happiness. I woke and discovered that life was Duty. I did my Duty and discovered that life was Happiness.

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.

Like most of the movies I have participated in before, it's not a far departure from my actual self. TJ is a Special Forces, hand-to-hand combat expert. He's got a big heart. He has a sense of duty that never ends, whether he is active duty or as you find him in Check Point, retired.

Freedom & Duty always go hand in hand and if the free do not accept the duty of social responsibility, they will not long remain free.

The Church must take right ground in regard to politics... Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to the country as part of their duty to God... God will bless or curse this nation, according to the course Christians take in politics.

In countries where there is no marriage, there is no duty between husband and wife; when marriage comes, husband and wife live together on account of attachment; and that kind of living together becomes settled after generations; and when it becomes so settled, it becomes a duty.

In the priesthood we share the sacred duty to labor for the souls of men. We must do more than learn that this is our duty. It must go down into our hearts so deeply that neither the many demands on our efforts in the bloom of life nor the trials that come with age can turn us from that purpose.

It is the duty of a prudent minister of God to hold his ministry in honor and to see to it that it is respected by those who are in his charge. Moreoever, it is the duty of a faithful minister not to exceed his powers and not to abuse his office in pride, but, rather, to administer it for the benefit of his subjects.

Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.

Just as it is the duty of all men to obey just laws, so it is the duty of all men to disobey unjust laws.

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.

As a civilised society, we have a duty to support those among us who are vulnerable and in need. When times are hard, that duty should be felt more than ever, not disappear or diminish.

And just think, fellow Southrons, what kind of a Confederate nation we could have, if after independence, politicians abandoned equivocation and spoke honestly and firmly on all issues? If they were to do their duty to God, nation, and people, there would be virtually no need for any form of federal litigation.

The Bible must be the invention either of good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God. However, it was not written by good men, because good men would not tell lies by saying 'Thus saith the Lord;' it was not written by bad men because they would not write about doing good duty, while condemning sin, and themselves to hell; thus, it must be written by divine inspiration

The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.

I served two tours of duty in Vietnam. I won the Bronze Star. I won the Purple Heart.

President Obama and Hillary Clinton have engaged in gross dereliction of duty by surrendering the safety of the American people to open borders, and you know it better than anybody right here in Arizona. You know it.

It was the difference between walking with a stranger and walking with your heartmate. It was the difference between working for duty and working for love.

Remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action.

Every extension of the functions and power of the State beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should be scrutinized with jealous vigilance.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

People have a right to have their lives witnessed; if we coexist with the systems that abuse people, then we have a duty to understand.

As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it's my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what's happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.

It is our duty to ensure we have a peace worth fighting for.

Dammit Sir, it's your duty to get married. You can't always be living for pleasure!

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.

We all have a responsibility, and as Rabbi Heschel, one of my prophets, has put it: "Those who condone, or are silent, in the face of injustice, are more guilty than the perpetrators." And so, to the degree we pretend to be a democracy, we have a corresponding duty to be activist enough to prevent our human rights form being infringed upon.

...It is a proud privilege to be a soldier – a good soldier … [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.

I now add, farther, that the apostles argument is so far from proving it to be the duty of people to obey, and submit to, such rulers as act in contradiction to the public good, and so to the design of their office, that it proves the direct contrary.

Each day look into your conscience and amend your faults; if you fail in this duty you will be untrue to the Knowledge and Reason that are within you. Keep a watchful eye over yourself as if you were your own enemy; for you cannot learn to govern yourself, unless you first learn to govern your own passions and obey the dictates of your conscience.

The duty we owe ourselves is greater than that we owe others.

We have no eternal allies, and we have not perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.

In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.

Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty.