Quotes About Duty

It is just the old way--that of obedience. If you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar--if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from God, was a better man, a different man--one of your first duties must be to open your ears to His words and see whether they seem to you to be true. Then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of its miseries into life indeed.

the road to the next duty is the only straight one

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

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.

What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;

he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.

Deed, I aye had eneuch adu to du the thing I had to du, no to say the thing 'at naebody wad du but mysel'. I hae had nae leisur' for feelin's an' that, insisted Miss Horn.

shall this armour be furbished, but by the blows of knightly encounter, until the last speck has disappeared from every spot where the battle-axe and sword of evil-doers, or noble foes, might fall; when I shall again lift my head, and say to my squire, 'Do thy duty once more, and make this armour shine.

For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them.

Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.

Who obeys, shines.

It is not betrayal of feeling, but avoidance of duty, that constitutes weakness.

and will therefore send the man forth from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to the rightness that is in it, will tend.

Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills; neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action. It is its noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result, when the duty itself is certain, or even when a course seems with strong probability to be duty.

the way to worship God while the daylight lasts is to work; the service of God, the only divine service, is the helping of our fellows.

However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make anyone 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?

The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man.... A man may be aware of the highest truths of many things, and yet not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim: he has not come into the flower of his own being.

The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.

just a decent resolve to do a government's first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box

Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades, cried Squealer almost pleadingly