Quotes About Obligation

This, I came to understand, was what freedom tasted like. It wasn't a heady illusion in the safety of a time-shared bed, seeking the approval of the person whose heart you are breaking. It is being willing to have your own heart broken and not blaming the outcome on anyone. It is being an orphan, and love not being an obligation or prescription, but always a risky, transformative choice.

Don't say yes out of obligation. When you don't feel an inner yes, say no to others' requests for your help. Reserve some of your time and energy for things you love to do.

Per far da papa bisogna saper far da sagrestano» –

The responsibility to educate the next generation should be solemn. Unlike, say, the obligation to incarcerate people who have inhaled the smoke of the burning leaves of an illegal plant.

If we want to be endowed with rights – real human rights, we have to act with responsibility. We must not be comfortable with rights. We must be comfortable with responsibility.

Don Corleone Someday - and that day may never come - I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as gift on my daughter's wedding day.

I remind mothers everywhere of the sanctity of your calling. No other can adequately take your place. No responsibility is greater, no obligation more binding than that you rear in love and peace and integrity those whom you have brought into the world.

As Maynard Keynes famously observed: "If I owe you a pound, I have a problem, but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

Debt is the worst poverty.

To make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.

...the historian must serve two masters, the past and the present. And while his obligation to the past, his complete, unassailable fidelity to it, must always claim his first loyalty, he must accept the fact that the choices he makes as a historian are not of consequence to him alone, but will affect the moral sense, perhaps the wisdom of his generation.

I don't know nothing for sure, except water runs downhill and I gotta pay my rent.

There are also those who, like the author, ensconce themselves on a thunderous crag of omniscience and, with protestations of humility which are either unconvincing or totally absent, assume the obligation of appraisal, commendation, derogation or denunciation of their contemporaries. Still, by and large it is an easier job than digging a ditch.

With her husband dead and no other man willing to take her, Hoelun was now outside the family, and as such no one had any obligation to help her. The message that she was no longer a part of the band came to her, the way Mongols always symbolize relationships, through food.

The Ethical can therefore end up making us irresponsible.

Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.

It's amputate or die. Simple. And when it comes down to it, you can't die. Not yet. Once you're born, you are obligated to survive. At all costs.

But a vassal should never expect his lord to reward his services or even acknowledge them: To serve is duty, duty is samurai, samurai is immortality.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness.… This heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system.… Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can.

Right now, I'm worth a million dollars, and I owe Uncle Sam a million-and-a-half dollars, and I made a deal with him. I said, 'Uncle Sam, I'm going to pay you 25 grand a month.'

If 10 percent is good enough for the Lord, it ought to be good enough for Uncle Sam.

Belgium thinks that however great the peril which a country might have to undergo under the system which we seek to establish here, that country ought to do its duty.