Quotes About Responsibility

We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

We seem unwilling to allow for the possibility that the glory of our species may lie not only in the launching of satellites, the founding of companies, and the manufacturing of miraculously thin semiconductors but also in an ability—even if it is widely distributed among billions—to spoon yogurt into small mouths, find missing socks, clean toilets, deal with tantrums, and wipe congealed things off tables.

It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.

A work of tragedy would rise to its true moral and edifying possibilities when the audience looked upon the hero's ghastly errors and crimes and was left with no option but to reach the terrifying conclusion: 'How easily I, too, might have done the same.

the disciplined and sedated authority of the scientist entrusted with the safe management of unfeasible rage

BOREDOM IS A new challenge and responsibility.

In the wake of the affair, Rabih adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants.

We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals. We were often not mature.

It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.

If we wanted to think about it,' wrote Proust, 'perhaps there is no really loving mother who could not, on her dying day, and often long before, address this reproach to her son. The truth is that as we grow older we kill all those who love us by the cares we give them, by the anxious tenderness we inspire in them and constantly arouse.

To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

If as adults we have even a measure of mental health, it is almost certainly because, when we were helpless infants, there was a person (to whom we essentially owe our lives) who pushed their needs to one side for a time in order to focus wholly on ours. They interpreted what we could not quite say, they guessed what might be ailing us, they settled and consoled us. They keyp the chaos and noise at bay and cut the world up into manageable pieces for us.

I would have thought, said the prime minister, that Your Majesty was above literature. Above literature? said the Queen. Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity.

I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.

One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement

Never be prime minister at the start of a war, Nessie [..] The man that lead you into it isn't the one to lead you out of it.

One has given one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be Queen, I have often thought the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots.

Aamulla kuningattarella oli vähän nuhaa, ja koska sovittuja tapaamisia ei ollut, hän sanoi olevansa ehkä vilustunut ja jäi vuoteeseen. Se ei ollut hänelle tyypillistä eikä myöskään totta, hän sanoi sen oikeastaan vains siksi että saisi jatkaa lukemista.

She had always been good at duty until she started reading.

The king is up. You attend on the king, not on the clock. When the king is awake, you are awake.

No, in the end what persuaded me was simply Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that he had asked me. My father would have made such a decision on his own and only informed my mother after the fact. That Jae-sun sought my opinion—my consent—meant more to me than I could say. And because of that, I could not gainsay him this job.

You were supposed to be free [...] That was all I had to give you.

Quit making believe you don't know. You do know. Act on it.

Those who recognize their innocence do not expect, receive, or accept punishment from any outside source.