Home / Topics / Duty Quotes

Duty Quotes

Browse 4172 quotes about Duty.

Duty Quotes

“In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.”

Giving Book Real Age Duty Intellectual Tasks Criticism Critics Credit Honorable Rubbish Shameless Real Power

Book:A Victorian spectator: uncollected writings of R.H. Hutton

Source: A Victorian spectator: uncollected writings of R.H. Hutton

“By exposing yourself to risk, you're exposing yourself to heavy-duty learning, which gets you on all levels. It becomes a very emotional experience as well as an intellectual experience. Each time you make a mistake, you're learning from the school of hard knocks, which is the best education available.”

Wells Hard School Levels Mistake Risk Emotional Duty Intellectual Available Heavy Exposing Best Education Exposing Yourself School Of Hard Knocks

Author:Gifford Pinchot

“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.”

Source: A Collection of Essays

“For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.”

“Few of us have been so exceptionally unfortunate as not to find, in our own age, some experienced friend who has helped us by precious counsel, never to be forgotten. We cannot render it in kind, but perhaps in the fulness of time it may become our noblest duty to aid another as we have ourselves been aided, and to transmit to him an invaluable treasure, the tradition of the intellectual life.”

Kind May Has Beens Age Duty Friends Intellectual Tradition Forgotten Aids Treasure Unfortunate Transmit Invaluable Intellectual Life

Book:The Intellectual Life

Source: The Intellectual Life

“The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.”

Humans Duty Intellectual Criticism Appreciation Noble Factors Human Life Distinction Discontent Provocative Emergence

Author:Alfred North Whitehead

“One might feel indignant at the injustice which deals out what is called fame with so unequal a hand, were it not for the reflection that men who are competent to add to the intellectual wealth of the world, and enlarge the domain of knowledge, have learned to take popular applause at its true value, and to find in the faithful discharge of honorable duty a satisfaction which is its own reward.”

Source: Life and Campaigns of George B. McClellan, Major-general U. S. Army

“The ministers are in duty bound to denounce all intellectual pride, and show that we are never quite so dear to God as when we admit that we are poor, corrupt and idiotic worms; that we never should have been born; that we ought to be damned without the least delay.... The old creed is still taught. They still insist that God is infinitely wise, powerful and good, and that all men are totally depraved. They insist that the best man god ever made, deserved to be damned the moment he was finished.”

Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

“charity is a calm, severe duty; it must be intellectual, to be advantageous. It is a strange mistake that it should ever be considered a merit; its fulfillment is only what we owe to each other, and is a debt never paid to its full extent.”

Should Mistake Compassion Strange Duty Intellectual Paid Charity Calm Debt Fulfillment Merit Severe

Book:The Complete Works of L. E. Landon ...

Source: The Complete Works of L. E. Landon ...

“Western intellectual Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam.”

Duty Calling Intellectual Islam Western Critical Faculty Betrayed

Author:Wafa Sultan

“I think it's an intellectual duty for a person who lives in a free society to read material not only with which you agree, but with which you disagree. Because every so often somebody you think is wrong will actually turn out to be right.”

Thinking Persons Turns Materials Duty Intellectual Agree Disagree Free Society

Author:Tom Clancy

“People always think that loyalty is laudable. People are always saying that we must remain faithful to tradition, to family, to our class, to our ideas. Of course not! That would be equivalent to zero brain activity. If you really want to think, to seek truth, to advance intellectually, you must turn your back on clichés, on preconceived ideas - even those belonging to your spiritual family. For an intellectual, his true duty is not to fidelity, but to infidelity.”

People Thinking Spiritual Brain Duty Intellectual Tradition Loyalty Faithful Belonging Infidelity Fidelity

Author:Bernard-Henri Levy

“The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.”

People Firsts Mean Government Political Politics Education Moral Duty Clothes Intellectual Fuel

Book:Fors Clavigera

Source: Fors Clavigera

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Source: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson