duty Quotes

There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and that is his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution.

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.

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

“I am asham’d that women are so simple To offer war where they should kneel for peace, Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, When they are bound to serve, love, and obey. Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts?”

“A noble mind finds its purest joy in the accomplishment of its duty, and to that willingly sacrifices its inclination.”

“Because,” she told him, her voice taut, “now that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go.”

“While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger.”

“JUDGE: It’s now your duty to sit down and try and separate the facts from the fancy.”

“If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of the girls, I am not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty to do so.”

“It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.”

“When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.”

“Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”

He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love.

“I am the Chosen One. I have to kill him. I need that memory.”

“Keep the commission D’Artagnan-the profession of arms suits you; you will be a brave and adventurous captain.”

″... he answered that he was a musketeer at heart, entirely devoted to your majesty, and that he would therefore remain with messieurs the musketeers.”

“I told you that ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‘Delinquent’ means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.”

“My mother was one of the first few blacks to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954. Three years later, when Grandma discovered I would be one of the first blacks to attend Central High School, she said the nightmare that had surrounded my birth was proof positive that destiny had assigned me a special task.”

“My mother was one of the first few blacks to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954. Three years later, when Grandma discovered I would be one of the first blacks to attend Central High School, she said the nightmare that had surrounded my birth was proof positive that destiny had assigned me a special task.”

“You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the sign.”

“I . . . looked in the mirror. . . . I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. . . . And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.”

″‘Well, I was with [Caspian] on that journey: with him and Reepicheep the Mouse, and the Lord Drinian and all of them […] and what I want to say is this, that I’m the King’s man; and if this parliament of owls is any sort of plot against the King, I’m having nothing to do with it.‘”

“Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn’t hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human […] But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth.”

“I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all the hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what’s in a man’s heart.”

″‘Peter, High King of Narnia,’ said Aslan. ‘Shut the Door.’ Peter, shivering with cold, leaned out into the darkness and pulled the Door to. It scraped over ice as he pulled it. Then, rather clumsily (for even in that moment his hands had gone numb and blue) he took out a golden key and locked it.‘”

“For, feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the fourteen rooms in the main house.”

“She’s my daughter, Rose. My own flesh and blood. I can’t deny her no more than I can deny them boys. . . . You and them boys is my family. You and them and this child is all I got in the world. So I guess what I’m saying is . . . I’d appreciate it if you’d help me take care of her.”

“I wasn’t a stand-in for Dad. Nobody could be that. When the IED got him in Afghanistan, he became an instant saint in Springfield. I wasn’t him. I’d never be him. But I was still supposed to try. That was my role: the dutiful son.”

“It is possible that I appear to you a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”

“Well, I won’t be lectured to by you about my everlasting duties to Nessie. I gave her my childhood. ... She’s made her life the way she wants it, and she still has choice and free will even now.”

″‘You want to find out if you can really do the job,’ he explained. Like those guys in the books. They’d been tested and proven. It was another generation of Ranger’s turn now. Their turn.”

“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost . . . They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit.”

“Ivan Ilych was...a capable, cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man, though strict in the fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty: and he considered his duty to be what was so considered by those in authority.”

“I am a good woman, I hope; and I know my duty.”

“None of us wants to die. But it’s a possibility, and if you don’t accept that, it’s going to be in the back of your head the whole time, and you’re not going to be able to function. So you accept it, you realize that you’re not going to be able to talk to your family possibly ever again.”

“That’s the duty of the old . . . to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

“The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”

“When citizens would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall.”

“Whatever God works in us by his grace, he commands us to do as our duty. God works all in us and by us.”

“Nephew, I know now what the trouble is! You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth. You must have the horse dance first for the people to see. Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you.”

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

“The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

“And once I got old enough for such a thing to be a possibility, he told me that a man must be responsible for any seed he sows, for it’s his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I wasna prepared to do that, then I’d no right to burden a woman with the consequences of my own actions.”

“I was just numb all over, like a dead man walking.”

“The whole tribe was there, sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for dinner to be served. Except for the old man, of course. As usual, he was down the pub.”

“My poor Mum didn’t have any teeth. She’d gone into hospital and they’d taken them all out, every last one. It was because of us kids.”

″‘It is Aunt Caroline, Aunt Caroline,’ said the lady, her voice whining and creaking irritably. ‘I have been told by my lawyer that I am your aunt. I did not expect it, I did not seek it, but I shall not shrink from it.‘”

“And what a day Mr Tickle had. He tickled the policeman on traffic duty at the crossroads in the middle of town. It caused an enormous traffic jam.”

“My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”

“What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”

“Come rain... or shine he tended his light.”

“If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school- with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses- then I am a happy man.”

“It was his solemn duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber from the large oriel window on the first and third Wednesdays in every month, and he did not see how he could honourably escape from his obligations. It is quite true that his life had been very evil, but, upon the other hand, he was most conscientious in all things connected with the supernatural.”

“How can you render the duties of justice to men when you’re afraid they’ll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you?”

“There was a great wish in him to stay here on Gont, and forgoing all wizardry and venture, forgetting all power and horror, to live in peace like any man on the known, dear ground of his home land. That was his wish; but his will was other.”

“Tomorrow he would begin the task of breaking down the empire of Opium. It was a huge and terrifying job, but he wasn’t alone.”

″‘You will be knighted and you will have earned your knighthood,’ said the stranger. ‘A knight must help when his assistance is requested, must he not?‘”

“I hereby pledge myself to the service of God and of my people, to the righting of wrongs, to the driving-out of evil, to the bringing of peace and plenty to my land...”

″‘I want to go to art school and learn commercial art, but Dad wants me to be a barrister.’ ‘That’s like me,’ put in Jeremy. ‘I want to study music, but I’ve got to go into father’s office.‘”

The Whole Duty of Children A child should always say what’s true And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table; At least as far as he is able.

″‘I suppose I shall HAVE to be married some day,’ said Peter, ‘but it will be an awful bother having her round all the time. I’d like to marry a lady who had trances, and only woke up once or twice a year.”

“Honour binds a woman too, Rudolf. My honour lies in being true to my country and my House. I don’t know why God has let me love you; but I know that I must stay.”

“Return to your parents, fall on your knees before them, and, like a sensible and dutiful lad, implore their pardon for your imprudence.”

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said. “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed.”

‘Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to share my ignorance? Here is the book. Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know; unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here.’

“My Lord Godalming, I, too, have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead; and, by God, I shall do it! All I ask you now is that you come with me, that you look and listen; and if when later I make the same request you do not be more eager for its fulfilment even than I am, then—then I shall do my duty, whatever it may seem to me. And then, to follow of your Lordship’s wishes I shall hold myself at your disposal to render an account to you, when and where you will.”

“What may be the result, I know not. But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid.

“At least, they shall say of me,” thought this exemplary man, “that I leave no public duty unperformed, nor ill performed!”

Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty and will surely be the happier for it in the end?

“Don’t be dismal or fret, but do your duty and you’ll get your reward, as good Mr. Brooke has, by being respected and loved.”

All the little duties were faithfully done each day, and many of her sisters’ also, for they were forgetful, and the house seemed like a clock whose pendulum was gone a-visiting. When her heart got heavy with longings for Mother or fears for Father, she went away into a certain closet, hid her face in the folds of a dear old gown, and made her little moan and prayed her little prayer quietly by herself.

You are free, you leave the count’s house, and you take your mother to your home; but reflect, Albert, you owe her more than your poor noble heart can pay her. Keep the struggle for yourself, bear all the suffering, but spare her the trial of poverty which must accompany your first efforts; for she deserves not even the shadow of the misfortune which has this day fallen on her, and Providence is not willing that the innocent should suffer for the guilty.

“How would it suit you to be a night watchman?” “That wouldn’t do, sir. I have to be among the men at night.”

It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not asked, and you see me here. What I have to do as the confidential agent of another, I do. No less, no more.”

With a kind of stubbornness, Gregor’s father refused to take his uniform off even at home; while his nightgown hung unused on its peg Gregor’s father would slumber where he was, fully dressed, as if always ready to serve and expecting to hear the voice of his superior even here. The uniform had not been new to start with, but as a result of this it slowly became even shabbier despite the efforts of Gregor’s mother and sister to look after it.

I do not think any young woman has a right to make a choice that may be disagreeable and inconvenient to the principal part of her family, and be giving bad connections to those who have not been used to them.

They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.

“I am afraid I don’t think so, Lady Henry. I never talk during music—at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.”

“I am a man of honour, and it is my duty to love her still. But how came she to be reduced to so abject a state with the five or six millions that you took to her?”

“Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.”