Duties Quotes

“People who are not capable of boarding by group number do not deserve the right to vote.”
― J.K. Franko

“Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.”
― Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

“At some point the choice you will face is whether to carry out your duties or live your life”
― Cayla Kluver, Legacy

“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.”
― Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

“Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder.”
― D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

“I truly wanted to live a life in which I could make my own choices, independent of the 'duties' of my birth and position. It was only when fate granted that to me that I realized the cost of it. I could set aside my responsibilities to others and live my life as I please only when I also severed my ties to them. I could not have it both ways.”
― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool

“To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.”
― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool

“Don’t you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties with make leisure sweet when it comes, and to bear and for bear, that home may be comfortable and lovely to us all?”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The tissues of society become cancerous when the duties of some are transformed into the rights of others.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“You can’t define your duties. You can recognize your duties when they call you. The call comes from deep inside you. It may go against definitions set by mind.”
― Shunya

“Si el Paraíso, para ser Paraíso, propicia un vasto Infierno, el deber del poeta es convertir el Paraíso en Infierno”
― Roberto Bolaño, Sepulcros de vaqueros

“Thanks to everybody who does his work and job well. Doctors, Teachers, builders, chefs, parents, students, and anyone who does his best in his duties faithfully and sincerely deserve to be thanked and acknowledged.
Working hard to achieve the best isn't like running away from responsibilities, so thanks to all the hard workers around the world for your patience, efforts, achievements.”
― Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi

“Teachers deserve a well-defined, realistic job description and enough protected school day planning time to fulfill that job within their paid contracted hours.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession

“Do not talk of rights, else
politics would start
Scales would come out,
haggling would start”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Born as we are into a fallen race of sinners, we all tend to be selfish. We want things our way. We want what we want when we want it. Good parents do their best to train and discipline that selfishness out of us, and good teachers and pastors reinforce the lesson. But that self-centered tendency is deep-rooted, and it almost always requires hand-to-hand combat in the arena of life where the wants of self are pitted against the needs of others. Marriage and family provides this arena. Family is the perfect challenge to selfishness. Living in a family demands that I be sensitive to the needs of others. It demands my time. It intrudes on my wants. It tramples my ego. It virtually obliterates the concept of leisure. What a blessing!

No, I'm not being facetious; these duties are truly blessings. Without such duties, we would become utterly self-centered, egotistical, and narcissistic- all of which are deadly because focus on self alienates us from God. Facing up to our duties beats down selfishness and forms godly character by challenging the supremacy of self.

Let me be quick to say that marriage and family are not the only means of beating down the curse of selfishness. Many single people and childless couples are truly godly in character, compassionate, loving, and unselfish in all their doings. But I think marriage and family provide a rewarding means of dealing with selfishness because the glue that holds us to it when we'd rather bail out is love.”
― Michael W Smith

“Attend to your duties and be inwardly detached, knowing that nothing, no one belongs to you.”
― Dada J.P. Vaswani

“In a democracy, politics is an expression and form of public ethics, wherein citizens become aware of their interdependence, and the reciprocity in this relationship reinforces their mutual respect for the rights and duties of each to the other.”
― Michael Singh

“You won't get credit for everything you do. Be find with that. You did it because it needed to be done.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“Justice is most often a fight, not a right.”
― Rian Nejar

“Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its raison d’etre is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labour on the land, or labour in government, which are involved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependants, or both. He who exploits his property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at once perverts its very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has ‘every man’s living and does no man’s duty.”
― RH Tawney

“The natural rights of which we have so far been speaking are inextricably bound up with as many duties, all applying to one and the same person. These rights and duties derive their origin, their sustenance, and their indestructibility from the natural law, which in conferring the one imposes the other... it follows that in human society one man's natural right gives rise to a corresponding duty in other men; the duty, that is, of recognizing and respecting that right. Every basic human right draws its authoritative force from the natural law, which confers it and attaches to it its respective duty. Hence, to claim one 's rights and ignore one 's duties, or only half fulfill them, is like building a house with one hand and tearing it down with the other.”
― Pope John XXIII

“When Liberalism denied the correlation between right and duty, it ended by emphasizing right to the exclusion of duty. The led inevitably to the present situation, where no one can coherently speak of duties at all, for the only duty left is to respect another man's rights.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The truth is that it is impossible to bestow a right. Only duties can be placed on a man, and anyone pretending to offer you a right is trying to smuggle "the last of all oppressions" right under your nose. But this is how it has always gone, for Liberalism is a flatterer.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Discharge your duties with all diligence.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Duties of American Citizenship

“The wet sand on the shore
Feels good to walk on.
The waves lick my feet;
Beg me to return
But I have to wade in--
To have a row with The Sea
.......A lot to explore”
― Khurram Shahzad, Voyager: A Journey to Self and Love

“The great thing for Ivan Ilyich, however, was that he had his office. His whole interest now centred in the world of his duties and this interest absorbed him. The sense of his own power, the feeling of being able to ruin anybody he wished to ruin, even the external dignity of his position, when he made his entry into the court or met with his subordinates, the fact that he was successful in the eyes of superiors and subordinates, and, above all, his masterly handling of cases, of which he was conscious - in all these he rejoiced as he did in the chats with his colleagues, the dinners and whist which filled his time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Yeah well what I wanted to say is that it's really the most basic duty for parents to feed their children...”
― Dominique Goblet, Pretending Is Lying

“A man comes to a woman only if he loves her, otherwise, no duties will keep him close to her.”
― Ash Gabrieli, Petrichor

“And he is not at an age right for renunciation; he has not even entered the stage of the householder, as befits a well educated man; he has not therefore paid back his dues to the gods and to his ancestral spirits and to his fellowmen. Bound by these dues where can he go now? He has no experience at all of women and consequently of samsara. He has not therefore attained any of the purusharthas of life, namely dharma, artha and kama. He has not even rendered personal service to his parents to ensure their comfort. He has not helped his loving relations, nor endowed his dear friends with wealth, nor honoured the wise. He has not shared his wealth with his dependants nor fulfilled the desires of those begging for favours.

"He has not founded his lineage by begetting sons and grandsons. Nor has he performed any great sacrificial rituals. He has not given generous gifts nor fulfilled his obligations of hospitality. He has not done his duty by this world. He has not adorned the earth with dams, wells and water distributing centres, with palaces, ponds and groves. Above all he has not still spread his fame far and wide which alone would live on till the end of the world.”
― Bāṇabhaṭṭa, Kadambari