Quotes about Duty

She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it—they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden—yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it.

All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle, said Jessica Pratt, the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can't be happy anyway.

Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do what the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you.

Can't wait for tomorrow when I get to exercise my patriotic duty as an American: Complaining about how long it's taking to VOTE.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

I believe that we don't need to worry about what happens after this life, as long as we do our duty here-to love and to serve.

We ought to read and search the Holy Scriptures much, and do it with the design to know the whole of our duty, and in order that the word of God may be "a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our paths." Psal. cxix. 105. Every one ought to strive to get knowledge in divine things, and to grow in such knowledge, to the end that he may know his duty, and know what God would have him to do.

We ought to be much concerned to know whether we do not live in the gratification of some lust, either in practice or in our thoughts: whether we do not live in the omission of some duty, some thing which God expects we should do; whether we do not go into some practice or manner of behaviour, which is not warrantable.

Bonhoeffer himself knew that in all of it, he was being utterly obedient to God. For him, that was the cantus firmus that made the dizzying complexities of it all perfectly coherent.

It's our job to "keep" the republic called America, and we can hardly keep what we don't even know we have.

The term "noblesse oblige"—the idea that those who have been blessed with much are to use it to help those who have not been so blessed—would not be coined for another half-century, and Wilberforce had yet to discover the relevance of any such idea to his own life.

Strange that the most generous men and religious, do not see that their duties increase with their fortune, and that they will be punished for spending it" on themselves in eating and drinking.