“Service is born out of love not duty.”
— Todd Stocker
“A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward.”
— Lee Child
“Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.”
— John Stuart Mill
“He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.”
— Henry James
“Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel.”
— George MacDonald
“What if you had seen haven open as Stephen did, and all the saints there triumphing in glory, and enjoying the end of their labours and sufferings, what a life would you lead after such a sight as this! Why, you will see this with your eyes before it be long.Thou hast the more cause to doubt a great deal, because thou never didst doubtl and yet more because thou hast been so careless in thy confidence. What do these expressions discover, but a wilful neglect of thy own salvation? As a shipmaster that should let his vessel alone, and mind other matters, and say, I will venture it among the rocks, and sands, and gulfs, and waves, and winds; I will never touble myself to know wheter it shall come safe to the harbour; I will trust God with it; it will speed as well as other men’s vessels do. Indeed, as well as other men’s that are as careless and idle, but not so well as other mens’s that are diligent and watchful. What horrible abuse of God is this, for men to pretend that they trust God with their souls only to cloak their own wilful negligence! (290-291)”
— Richard Baxter
“Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white–or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, “Lead us not into temptation,” knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.”
— George MacDonald
“Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.”
— Oscar Wilde
“Duty comes in many forms; at times duty to country may conflict with duty to family. Yet, with a lucid mind the guises can be torn away and in the end, duty becomes but one, and that duty is to value justice above everything–to do what is right not because someone ordains it, but because the heart which is the seat of truth decrees it so.”
— F. Sionil José
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Why must duty require me to break my own heart?”
— Rachel Hauck
“He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are. So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.”
— Charles Dickens
“I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it sis my duty … This is my highest and best use as a human.”
— Ben Stein
“To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.”
— Immanuel Kant
“There are no saints either. We are immortal, but not so unlike the humans as you think. We have enemies, we have duties, we hate, we struggle, and we love.”
— Jessica Fortunato
“The scripture talks about man managing, ruling the earth, as the sole duty of man.”
— Sunday Adelaja
“Ain’t all buttons and charts, little albatross. Know what the first rule of flying is? Well I s’pose you do, since you already know what I’m ’bout to say.I do. But I like to hear you say it.Love. Can know all the math in the ‘verse but take a boat in the air that you don’t love? She’ll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down…tell you she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens…makes her a home.”
— Joss Whedon
“One’s duty is always and everywhere to be true to one’s own experience.”
— Marty Rubin
“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based! If you can’t find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform!”
— Ronald D. Moore and Naren Shankar
“Of two duties we must choose the greater, though of two sins we must choose neither (556).”
— Richard Baxter
“We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.”
— Jennifer Michael Hecht
“The whole duty of our existence is fear God.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita
“I know of only one duty, and that is to love.”
— Albert Camus
“And we must still try or we would be leaving our friends to fight without us. I think this is what you have meant by duty, all along; I do understand, at least this much of it.”
— Naomi Novik
“To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it’s an absolute duty.”
— Stieg Larsson
“Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”
— Gregory Bateson
“The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years.”
— C.S. Lewis
“I shout at him to remind him of his duties. That does not mean that I do not trust him at all.”
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya
“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”
— Nikola Tesla
“So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.”
— Bertrand Russell