Sense of Obligation Quotes

Everyone takes pleasure in returning small obligations, many people acknowledge moderate ones; but there are only a scarce few who do not pay great ones with ingratitude.

Duty is heavier than a mountain, Dai Shan.' That time, Lan did flinch. How long had it been since someone had been able to do that to him with mere words? He remembered teaching that same concept to a youth out of the Two Rivers. A sheepherder, innocent of the world, fearful of the fate laid out before him by the Pattern.

Every mission constitutes a pledge of duty. Every man is bound to consecrate his every faculty to its fulfilment. He will derive his rule of action from the profound conviction of that duty.

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

I went [to war] because I couldn't help it. I didn't want the glory or the pay; I wanted the right thing done.

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

I got into the right frame of mind that I will serve my country. I didn't volunteer to do it, but they've asked me, so that's what I'll do.

Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Why did you do it?" I say. "You want me dead. You were willing to do it yourself! What changed?" He presses his lips together and doesn't look away, not for a long time. Then he opens his mouth, hesitates, and finally says, " I can't be in anyone's debt. Okay? The idea that I owed you something made me sick. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit. Indebted to a stiff? It's ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And I couldn't have it.

Duty is a very personal thing. It is what comes from knowing the need to take action and not just a need to urge others to do something.

Do the duty which lies nearest to thee.

The National Award is a matter of pride for me, and it has also increased my responsibilities towards the country.

You find in some a sort of graceless modesty, that makes them ashamed to requite an obligation.

Some pretend want of power to make a competent return; and you shall find in others a kind of graceless modesty, that makes a man ashamed of requiting an obligation, because it is a confession that he has received one.

When habit has strengthened our sense of duties, they leave us no time for other things; but when young we neglect them and this gives us time for anything.

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

I'm a pessimist. But I'm a pessimist with a sense of responsibility.

As a young player, national duty always felt kind of like... a duty. It was always there, it was normal, it was part of the job.

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism [sic] and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.

I feel it is my duty to plod on, while daylight shall last.

Yes, it is difficult for man to cross beyond the idea of duty.