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Quotes About Oaths

Topher?" Dude, how many oaths did this kid plan to break in his first month as a Digger?Who did he think he was?Me?
~ Diana Peterfreund
For the future, please promise me you will not make any life-altering oaths in order to influence my love life.
~ Andrew Rowe
Fidelity and allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those oaths.
~ Isaac Newton
she swore in good mouth-filling oaths, but never smutty ones, and that was uncommon. She knew the prosody of profanity. . . . she knew the tune, as well as the words. She was not a raving beauty, but she had fine eyes and a Pre-Raphelite air of being too good for this world while at the same time exhibiting much of what this world desires in a woman, and I suppose I gaped at her and behaved clownishly.
~ Robertson Davies
Never go in, miss. Never say a prayer at its door. If you are angry, do not seek revenge by the Laughing Maiden stone, or at the threshold of the Tombs. There be those who listen for oaths and vows, and them that takes it quite to heart. What may be said in innocence and ire becomes flesh and blood should it be uttered in such places.
~ Douglas Clegg
What heavenly power lends an ear To a breaker of oaths, a deceiver?
~ Euripides
Gone is the trust to be placed in oaths; I cannot understand if the gods you swore by then no longer rule, or men live by new standards of what is right.
~ Euripides
From the cultic point of view, the consequences were not fundamentally alien to tradition. Oaths were sworn by the genius of the master, and just as that of the paterfamilias was honoured in domestic lararia, henceforward Augustus's 'Genius' had his place in private chapels. But the veiled genius, who exemplified piety with his patera for libations and promised happiness with his horn of plenty, was often replaced by the sovereign's picture.
~ Robert Turcan
the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor , is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.
~ Lois McMaster Bujold
He had sworn a thousand times to kill her, but Cosca had broken all manner of oaths in his life, and the sight of her brought no rage. Instead what welled up in him was a mixture of worn-out self-pity, sappy joy and, most of all, piercing shame at seeing in her face how far he had fallen. He felt the ache in his nose, behind his cheeks, tears welling in his stinging eyes. For once he was grateful that they were red as wounds at the best of times. If he wept, no once could tell the difference.
~ Joe Abercrombie
I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And oaths were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far,— Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
God will not take you to task for vain words in your oaths, but He will take you to task for what your hearts have earned.
~ Anonymous
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.
~ Franz Kafka
I say you must not win an unjust case by oaths.
~ Aeschylus
Oaths are made to be kept only until their purpose be fulfilled, the fluty voice responded. Every geas is lifted at last, every self-set rule repealed. Otherwise orderliness in life becomes a limitation to growth; discipline, chains; integrity, bondage and evil-doing. You have learned what you can from the world. You have graduated from that huge portion or Nehwon. It now remains that you take up your postgraduate studies in Lankhmar, the highest university of civilized life here.
~ Fritz Leiber
Priests, she insisted, could not sin. It was a thing impossible. Everything that they did, and wished, was of course right. She hoped I would see the reasonableness and duty of the oaths I was to take, and be faithful to them.
~ Maria Monk
The oaths of a woman I inscribe on water.
~ Sophocles
The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
~ John F. Kennedy
flatter princes with an opinion, that they have a divine right to absolute power, let the laws by which they are constituted and are to govern, and the conditions under which they enter upon their authority, be what they will ; and their engagements to observe them ever so well ratified by solemn oaths and promises.
~ John Locke
Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life.
~ Gene Wolfe
The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All I knew for sure was that all the hocuses in the Mirador swore oaths on the Virtu every single day, and that was what kept the Mirador from tearing itself apart. No matter how you felt about the hocuses sitting on top of the city like a pack of vultures, you didn't want the Virtu broken.
~ Sarah Monette
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed offerings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.
~ Seamus Heaney
Let us swear while we may, for in heaven it will not be allowed.
~ Mark Twain