Duty Quotes

You know, that man has a spirit, that each man and woman is unique, that we have duty to promote our unalienable rights and to protect them, that we have a duty to our families and ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to contribute to charity, that we have a duty to support a just and righteous law that is stable and predictable.

~ Mark R. Levin

We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns.

~ Aaron Sorkin

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

~ Claudia J. Edwards

The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.

~ Seth Dickinson

Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark pool

~ Dean Koontz

When you are given a duty, you must honour responsibility.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not.

~ Mark Twain

The needs are too great, and there are too few of us. We have a duty, a responsibility to help others. It’s not all about fun. It’s not always easy.

~ Leland Dirks

A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.

~ Victor Hugo

[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]

~ Chapman Cohen

But the minimum human duty is to serve others: it is no great attainment.

~ Idries Shah

You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.

~ Bhagavad Gita

In truth, ideas and principles are independent of men; the application of them and their illustration is man's duty and merit. The time will come when the author of a view shall be set aside, and the view only taken cognizance of. This will be the millennium of Science.

~ Edward Forbes

One can with but moderate possessions do what one ought.

~ Aristotle

Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You’re afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it’s because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?

~ Hilary Mantel

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I have been blessed with luck, talent and opportunities, now it is my duty to add the hardworking element.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Mankind has a divine duty, to be stewardship of the natural resources.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

~ Richard Courant

I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

It's his duty. A good healer can't pick and choose. If he can help, then he must.

~ Helene Wecker

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.

~ Ouida

Love is the bane of honor, the death of duty.

~ George R.r. Martin

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

~ Jeff Shaara

The only chains you should wear in life are the chains of commitment.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Maybe in death you’ll understand that love, and all other needs take a backseat when the one thing you want, stands against all that you swear to protect.

~ Charles Lee

Duty and honor are oft enough realm only for those with security to afford them.

~ Chris Galford

She very much feared that if she stayed with Maximus, this awful taint – this terribly wrong act – would, day by day, year by year, wear at her until she was no more than a ghost of her former self. She saw need when she looked into his eyes, but was there any love as well? Had she discarded Penelope’s friendship for a man who didn’t, in the end, truly care fo

~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

~ Carsten Jensen

No man of honor avoided what needed to be done, simply because it might not proceed in his favor.

~ Claire Delacroix

It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?

~ Zadie Smith

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness.

~ William Shakespeare

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

~ George Macdonald

As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross, but merely as a duty, and does battle with it with dignity.He had devoted much mental care to his heart and its wise laws. Observing the reflection of beauty on the imagination, both consciously and unconsciously, then the transition from impression to emotion, its symptoms, play, and outcome and looking around himself, advancing into life, he derived for himself the conviction that love moves the world like Archimede's lever, that it holds as much universal and irrefutable truth and good as misunderstanding and misuse do hypocrisy and ugliness.p. 494

~ Ivan Goncharov

The way of painful duty is the way of fullest comfort. Christ carrieth all our comforts in his hand : if we are out of that way where Christ is to be met, we are out of the way where comfort is to be had (312).

~ Richard Baxter

My noble father,I do perceive here a divided duty.To you I am bound for life and education.My life and education both do learn meHow to respect you. You are the lord of my duty,I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband,And so much duty as my mother showedTo you, preferring you before her father,So much I challenge that I may professDue to the Moor my lord.

~ William Shakespeare

I understand the loss of a comrade is something to mourn, but our responsibilities do not end because one has lost the fight. We as defenders of this nation have an obligation to those who've sworn allegiance to us. And I intend to uphold my oath to the people of this land, no matter the cost.

~ Charles Lee

Major, I do not know why God does the things He does, but I believe you have the same duty to God as you have always had: to follow the right path, to live your life with a clear conscience.

~ Jeff Shaara