Duty Quotes

My obligation is to do the right thing. The rest is in God’s hands.

Martin Luther King Jr

Every right carries with it a corresponding duty.

Gandhi

In doing what we ought we deserve no praise, because it is our duty.

Joseph Addison

Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

Thomas Jefferson

Pure duty is the essential moment of relating itself, qua universality, to others.

Georg W F Hegel

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfil another.

George Eliot

Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

George Washington

My duty is to obey orders.

Stonewall Jackson

Duty is duty, and an order is an order.

Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra

To shun one's cross is to make it heavier.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

My own inclinations must not be followed - to duty I sacrifice them.

Abigail Adams

One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.

Helen Keller

There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is, his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution.

Jane Austen

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our power.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

Peter Drucker

Who escapes a duty, avoids a gain.

Theodore Parker

With faith, discipline and selfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

Andrew Carnegie

Without duty, life is sort of boneless; it cannot hold itself together.

Joseph Joubert

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Ben Stein

The first duty of a man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth.

Cicero

Every duty that is bidden to wait comes back with seven fresh duties at its back.

Charles Kingsley

Duty is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity.

Thoreau

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations.

Bertrand Russell

Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never do less.

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.

Indira Gandhi

It is our duty to be faithful, not with eye service as men pleasers.

Jupiter Hammon

Every duty is a charge, but the charge of oneself is the root of all others.

Mencius

Duty is that mode of action on the part of the individual which constitutes the best possible application of his capacity to the general benefit.

William Godwin

The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points - his duty God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbour, to do as he would be done by.

Thomas Paine

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

Oliver Wendell

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smile and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Humphrey Davy

We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.

Thomas Huxley

If each one sweeps before his own door, the whole street is clean.

Jewish saying

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.

Jean-Baptiste Moliere

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T Washington

Nothing strengthens the judgement and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.

Elizabeth Cady Standon

To let oneself be bound by a duty from the moment you see it approaching is part of the integrity that alone justifies responsibility.

Dag Hammarskjold

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.

Pearl S Buck

Duty without enthusiasm becomes laborious; duty with enthusiasm becomes glorious.

William Arthur Ward

The present means our duty at the moment. If we put all our strength into doing our duty, as we know it at this moment, we shall have made the highest human effort.

Mahatma Gandhi

Never step over one duty to perform another.

No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.

James Alle

Every right implies a responsibility; Every opportunity, an obligation, Every possession, a duty.

John D Rockefeller

Do not forget duty. But choose love when you can.

Cinda Williams Chima

We never fail when we try to do our duty, we always fail when we neglect to do it.

Robert Baden-Powell

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Duty doesn't need to call; it only needs to whisper. And if you heed the call, no matter what happens, you have no need for regret.

Dean Koontz

Stern daughter of the voice of God!

O Duty! if that name thou love

Who art a light to guide, a rod

To check the erring and reprove.

William Wordsworth

Though Duty's face is stern, her path is best:

They sweetly sleep who die upon her breast.

Henry Abbey

Every duty is great; great, because it tries our principle; great, because for the time being it tries our loyalty to conscience, and our energy and will.

E H Chapin

When I'm not thank'd at all, I'm thank'd enough:

I've done my duty, and I've done no more.

Henry Fielding

The want of reward is no warrant for us to dispense with our duty.

Samuel Richardson

The daily life is so wearisome; yet duty lies that way.

C W Leadbeater

If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.

Lyman Abbott

Even the wild beasts have a duty to perform, for duty is the handmaiden of life. All things that have life have a duty, for life itself is duty. When a man has no obligations, he is dead.

Janice Manning and Marshall Masters

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world...we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time beyond space and time, which whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Winston Churchill

DUTY, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

Ambrose Bierce

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.

George Eliot

Honour is no phantom. Duty doesn't melt away, no matter how much we might wish it to.

Claudia J Edwards

Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.

George Macdonald

Three things prompt men to a regular discharge of their duty in time of action: natural bravery, hope of reward, and fear of punishment.

George Washington

Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Mark Twain

Besides the five senses, there is a sixth sense, of equal importance - the sense of duty.

Christian Nestell Bovee

Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty--the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Mark Twain

The superior man is the man who fulfils his duty.

Eugene Ionesco

Oh righteous doom, that they who make

Pleasure their only end,

Ordering the whole life for its sake,

Miss that whereto they tend.

While they who bid stern duty lead,

Content to follow, they,

Of duty only taking heed,

Find pleasure by the way.

Richard Chenevix Trench

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;

I woke, and found that life was Duty.

Ellen Sturgis Hooper

The journey of life is plain and straight enough if people were trained to make principle their watchword and duty their rule.

James Platt

We never fail when we try to do our duty. We always fail when we neglect to do it.

Lord Baden-Powell

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Abraham Lincoln

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

Ecclesiastes 12:13

The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.

Martin Luther

I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily

C S Lewis

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We need to realize that in all things our first duty and responsibility is to God Himself.

Harry Ironside

The surest method of arriving at a knowledge of God's eternal purposes about us is to be found in the right use of the present moment. God's will does not come to us in the whole, but in fragments, and generally in small fragments. It is our business to piece it together, and to live it into one orderly vocation.

Frederick W Faber

No man ever flees from duty without incalculable hurt, not only to himself, but to others as well.

Clovis G Chappell

The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God.

Daniel Webster

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained.

Helen Keller

All moral obligation resolves itself into the obligation of conformity to the will of God.

Charles Hodge

Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.

Alexander MacLaren