Obligation In Life Quotes & Sayings

We cannot stop every act of senseless violence. We cannot know every evil that lurks in troubled minds. But if we can prevent even one tragedy like this, save even one life, spare other families what these families are going through, certainly we've got an obligation to try. — Barack Obama

We must always meet our obligation to those who fall behind without our assistance. But let's remember, without a race there can be no champion, no records broken, no excellence - in education or any other walk of life. — Ronald Reagan

For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man- not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. — Ortega Y Gasset

While within the sphere of real life, which not only has its rights, but itself imposes great obligations - within this sphere, if we wish to be humane, to be Christians finally, it is our duty and obligation to foster only those convictions that are justified by reason and experience, that have passed through the crucible of analysis, in a word, to act sensibly and not senselessly as in dreams or delirium, so as not to bring harm to a man, so as not to torment and ruin a man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I've got enough money in my life to retire now and do nothing. But I've got a duty and obligation to see if we can create more jobs in this state, and the government's got an obligation to approve projects and to assess them for the benefit of the people of Queensland. — Clive Palmer

That, in part, is why the Constitution's framers gave justices life tenure ? to enable them to rule wherever the law and the Constitution led them, without obligation or fear of political reprisal. Former Republican president Gerald Ford recently paid tribute to John Paul Stevens, his only appointee to the Supreme Court, who is also far more liberal than Republicans expected. He has served his nation well, ... with dignity, intellect and without partisan political concerns. — Gerald R. Ford

As my dad said, you have an obligation to leave the world better than how you found it. And he also reminded us to be givers in this life, and not takers. — Phil Crane

There is also the equal and opposite temptation to look at the world as though it were an extension of the imaginary. [...] Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees... — Paul Auster

In this life or the next, I hold you to your promise Mikhail Ivelitsch. — Travis Luedke

I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again - not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life. — Maggie Nelson

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life. — Elie Wiesel

Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve. — Julian Fellowes

I am not posing these questions only to the world at large. I query us who own Christ as our life. Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Is there not an obligation upon us to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God is we want to live in his wonderful peace? — Richard J. Foster

If it be asked, Why does God not bestow the same or equal blessing upon all people? we can only answer, that has not been fully revealed. We see that in actual life He does not treat all alike. For wise reasons known only to Himself He has given to some blessings to which they had no claim ... and has withheld from others gifts which He was under no obligation to bestow. — Loraine Boettner

Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent
anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked,
rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical,
monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic,
blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have
/nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our
own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this
day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!! — Mark Leyner

I think you're under no obligation whatsoever to forgive anything, to forget anything. You're not required to push away the years of abuse because the abuser now chooses to be sober and in his sobriety regrets his actions. And white may be small and unforgiving of me, I think people who do so at the snap of a dam finger are either liars or are in need of serious therapy. I assume you heard him out, so in my personal opinion, any debt you might owe for your existence is now paid in full. It may be fashionable to hold that terrible actions are indeed terrible, but that hte person inflicting them isn't responbile due to alcohol, drugs, DNA, or GD PMS. He damn well was responsible, and if you decided to loathe him for the rest of your life, I wouldn't blame you for it. How's that? (Cybil to Gage - she ROCKS) — Nora Roberts

Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that we've engaged in 'right' living, verses believing that living is a 'right. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am starting to see there is a difference between "saying prayers" and honest praying. Both can sound the same on the outside, but the former is too often motivated by a sense of obligation and guilt; whereas the latter is motivated by a conviction that I am completely helpless to "do life" on my own. Or in the case of praying for others, that I am completely helpless to help others without the grace and power of God. — Paul E. Miller

I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life. — Muhammad Ali

The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone's equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the government does not fulfill that obligation, it is the right of the people, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to 'alter or abolish' the government. — Howard Zinn

The beauty of life is in people who feel some obligation to enhance life. Without that, we're only half alive. — Ralph Waite

There's this really good line in 'Women in Love' where Ursula says, 'I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.' And actually I think that's very common, it's what a lot of people feel - that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can. — Rachel Cusk

Sometimes you have to risk life, in order to live, and gamble death, to sacrifice life. — Anthony Liccione

I worry about a culture that devalues life and believe as your president I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world. — George W. Bush

Just as a person is commanded to honor and revere his father, so he is under an obligation to honor and revere his teacher, even to a greater extent than his father; for his father gave him life in this world, while his teacher instructs him in wisdom, secures for him life in the world to come. — Maimonides

Destiny commands ... and imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a normal, casual life ... there are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the dimmest of understandings ... — James Hollis

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck, especially successful people. As they age and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There's a reason for this. The world doesn't want to acknowledge it either. Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that you have had success, you have also had luck. And with luck comes obligation. — Michael Lewis

We must look at what immigration to America involves. To the new arrivals, the change is excruciating. Learning a new language and dealing with strange customs make the first years of life in the new land painful ...
The economic system of the United States is a mighty engine of persuasion. It motivates people to do what otherwise they never would in return for fulfilling their dreams. In the process, people learn that there is no sharp line between physical well-being and the higher purposes of life. The comfort of owning a house is at once meeting the obligation to care for one — John Lachs

We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace - not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit ... not to prove any final, sociological point, and not event as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life-style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented. — Hunter S. Thompson

The machinery of compulsory equalization works against the finest trait of the human species, the fact that we recognize ourselves in our differences and build links based on them. The best of the world lies in the many worlds the world contains, the different melodies of life, their pains and strains: the thousand and one ways of living and speaking, thinking and creating, eating, working, dancing, playing, loving, suffering, and celebrating that we have discovered over so many thousands of years. Equalization, which makes us all goofy and all the same, can't be measured. No computer could count the crimes that the pop culture business commits each day against the human rainbow and the human right to identity. But its devastating progress is mind-boggling. Time is emptied of history, and space no longer acknowledges the astonishing diversity of its parts. Through the mass media the owners of the world inform us all of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror. — Eduardo Galeano

I would consider myself to be a moderate Republican, but more important than that, I believe our system of government is the best system there is ... and while I have no illusions of changing the world, I've had good opportunities in life, and I believe there's an obligation to give something back by participating. — Pat Meehan

Luz, we all have an obligation to the people who love us. They've given us this gift whether we want it or not and it is our duty to stand up and be worthy. We are not loved in proportion to our deserving, and thank God for that, for unworthies like you and me would find that life a bitch. We're loved to the level we ought to rise, and even in returning it we are obligated to be gentle. — Claire Vaye Watkins

The Universe had no obligation to create anything at all, yet life managed to make a grand entrance on at least one tiny pale blue dot in a truly spectacular way. — Mathew Anderson

Everything I've ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids. — Thomas L. Friedman

But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem. — M. Scott Peck

Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this will also be seen as artificial and distanced from life. — Karl Ove Knausgaard

The writer's job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that's part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Having tasted life without the pain of obligation perpetually burning him from within, he'd choose death over the return to bondage. He'd make that choice in an instant. Life as a slave was unspeakable; life as a slave who had briefly tasted freedom was unthinkable. — Ian Tregillis

In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency. — Machado De Assis

If you make a habit of sincere prayer, your life will be very noticeably and profoundly altered. Prayer stamps with its indelible mark our actions and demeanor. A tranquillity of bearing, a facial and bodily repose, are observed in those whose inner lives are thus enriched. Within the depths of consciousness a flame kindles. And man sees himself. He discovers his selfishness, his silly pride, his fears, his greeds, his blunders. He develops a sense of moral obligation, intellectual humility. Thus begins a journey of the soul toward the realm of grace ... — Alexis Carrel

I always felt, and I still feel, that the media doesn't belong in a public official's private life. It's a very difficult balance, because if you are elected to public office, people have a right to know a great deal about you, and the press has an absolute obligation to report all of that. But the reality is that there are times in which the reporting is really happening for almost voyeuristic reasons, in the gossip columns. Maybe half of it is wrong, and half of it is correct, and a lot of it is exaggerated. You've just got to get used to that if you're in public life. — Rudy Giuliani

It is a friend's duty that he does not leave his friend in a difficult position but provide intimacy and support to him. In difficulty who leaves is a false and the one not quitting is a true friend. — Acharya Mahapragya

Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line's edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice. — Tom Bissell

You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time, not only with the votes we cast, but the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideas. — Barack Obama

Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves. — Mark Twain

As someone who's spent time with our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on USO tours and met wounded warriors at Walter Reed and Bethesda, I feel a deep obligation to the men and women who have risked life and limb on our behalf. — Al Franken

I wouldn't say that comedy brought me away from it.I think that my idea of faith was another obligation in my life. — Jim Gaffigan

What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience. — John Stuart Mill

Natural Giving: Anything we do in life which is not out of that energy, we pay for and everybody else pays for. Anything we do to avoid punishment, everybody pays for. Everything we do for a reward, everybody pays for. Everything we do to make people like us, everybody pays for. Everything we do out of guilt, shame, duty, or obligation, everybody pays for. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced? — Claire Messud

I feel in the depths of my soul that it is the highest, most sacred, and most irreversible part of my obligation to preserve the union of these states, although it may cost me my life. — Andrew Jackson

Good manners lead to better relationships, more career success, and less personal stress. Manners are a relief, not a terrible obligation. It's my belief that etiquette isn't cold and formal; it's warm and flexible. I am very con- cerned with manners, but I am not a robot. Manners are simply about asking yourself, What's the right thing to do? I deeply believe that if we all have this simple question in our minds, we will do right by one another. From Gunn's Golden Rules
Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work
By Tim Gunn — Tim Gunn

7. The Law of Balance in Life. It is also the case with human affairs. Social positions high or low, occupations spiritual or temporal, work rough or gentle, education perfect or imperfect, circumstances needy or opulent, each has its own advantage as well as disadvantage. The higher the position the graver the responsibilities, the lower the rank the lighter the obligation. The director of a large bank can never be so careless as his errand-boy who may stop on the street to throw a stone at a sparrow; nor can the manager of a large plantation have as good a time on a rainy day as his day-labourers who spend it in gambling. The accumulation of wealth is always accompanied by its evils; no Rothschild nor Rockefeller can be happier than a poor pedlar. A mother of many children may be troubled by her noisy little ones and envy her sterile friend, who in turn may complain of her loneliness; but if they balance what they gain with what they lose, they will find the both sides are equal. — Kaiten Nukariya

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. — Philip Roth

And so I believe that God plays this enormous role in my life. And I believe that it's my obligation to give back and to follow the rules that were set. And it also gives me an enormous sense of my own place and an enormous sense of stability. — Ronald Perelman

Under the common law, one of the more controversial rules is the 'no duty to rescue rule' that says that, if you were not responsible for placing someone in danger or risk, you have no obligation to help them, even when it would cost little to save their life. — Jonathan Turley

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, "I do enjoy myself", or , "I am horrified," we are insincere. — E. M. Forster

A potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of life for the great majority of its citizens. — Mao Zedong

I'd been dreaming of such adventures since I was small. Back then I'd believed in destiny, and believed in it absolutely, with every strand and fiber of my little kid heart. I'd felt it like an itch in my chest while listening to my grandfather's extraordinary stories. "One day that will be me." What felt like obligation now had been a promise back then - that one day I would escape my little town and live an extraordinary life as he had done; and that one day, like Grandpa Portman, I would do something that mattered. — Ransom Riggs

In so many ways, a lot of the drive I've had to do certain things has been because of this sense that I have both the opportunity and in some sense the obligation to ratify that my parents' life had purpose. — Marco Rubio

We can be confident that action which is in accord with a few basic beliefs cannot be wrong and can at least testify to the values we will need to cultivate. These are the beliefs that the human race is a family that has inherited a place on the earth in common, that its members have an obligation to work toward sharing it so that none is deprived of the elementary needs for life, and that all have a responsibility to leave it undegraded for those who follow. — Gilbert F. White

They are also, both in origin and effect, religious. I am uneasy with the term, for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth. It has encouraged people to believe that the world is of no importance, and that their only obligation in it is to submit to certain churchly formulas in order to get to Heaven. And so the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere - to a pursuit of "salvation" that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. — Wendell Berry

You look at me and tell me you think you're some goddamn obligation to me. You look at me and tell me that we're pretending when the connection between us is the most tangible, overpowering thing I've ever felt in my life. If this is pretending, then I damn sure don't want to know what reality is. — Maya Banks

As he got to know her better, he learned more of her childhood; and he came to realize that it was typical of that of most girls of her time and circumstance. She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation. She — John Williams

Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves! — Fulton J. Sheen

I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't. — Natasha Pulley

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

Never before was it as incumbent upon every members to restate loyalty and exemplify fraternal obligation by consistent life and unimpeachable character. But these must be reinforced by a growing consciousness of the responsibilities that Alpha Phi Alpha faces in the world today, where, if ever the problems which beset us are to be solved and a way of deliverance discovered, it must be by the application of those principles upon which we are founded. — Jewel

Because I'm a performer I can justify and sometimes sell the things about me that offend and shock the conventional world. I need to live life in the fast lane. I need to do things to excess. I need to go over the edge. I have an obligation to experience the things most people can't experience. The taboos. The things you're not supposed to know or do. That's part of my job. That's why I do it. I would probably do it anyway. — Elizabeth Ashley

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this. — Eleanor Roosevelt

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I believe that God plays this enormous role in my life. And I believe that it's my obligation to give back and to follow the rules that were set. And it also gives me an enormous sense of my own place. — Ronald Perelman

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with ... But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation, and, as such, an dispensable factor in civilization. — Friedrich Von Bernhardi

In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer - or my life, period - would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory. — Elie Wiesel

She cannot escape marriage; it is her sacred Hindu duty, just as giving her away in marriage was her father's sacred Hindu duty. Like Indian Independence, marriage is her ultimate 'Tryst with Destiny,' and it is not in her hand to escape her preordained and compulsory fate. A marriageable daughter is the lowest common denominator in the giant scheme of things. — Chandana Roy

We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It's a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride. — Charles P. Pierce

The indictment knocked me on the head. First of all, I hand no idea at all about 90 per cent of the accusations in it. The crimes are horrible beyond belief, if they are true. Secondly, I don't see how they can fail to recognize a soldier's obligation to obey orders. That's the code I've live by all my life. — Alfred Jodl

I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister's maid of honor, it had never occured to me that I would get asked to be in anyone's wedding. I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are the like the triathlon of female friendship: the Shower, the Bachelorette Party, and the Main Event. It's the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall off their bikes or choke on ocean water. I figured if I valued my life, I'd stay away from weddings and they'd stay away from me. — Sloane Crosley

I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about. — Harold Ramis

Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution,the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north? ... There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single beingwhich accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields. — D.H. Lawrence

The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue; but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. And their audiences also do not seem to regard themselves as predestined to rule; they clap as if in defiance, and laugh at their enemies behind their hands, with the shrill laughter of children. They want to be right, not to do right. They feel no obligation to be part of the main tide of life, and if that meant any degree of pollution they would prefer to divert themselves from it and form a standing pool of purity. In fact, they want to receive the Eucharist, be beaten by the Turks, and then go to heaven. — Christopher Hitchens

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. — Thomas Jefferson

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape. — Oriana Fallaci

In social life, in the family government, in the Church, and in the State this is an acknowledged and invariable law. The debtor would be incapable of appreciating the clemency which cancelled the debt, so long as he denied either the existence or the justice of the claim. Unconscious of the obligation, he would be insensible to the grace that remitted it. — Octavius Winslow

In my relationship with God, I've learned that if I follow a 'formula' for how I spend my time with Him, then I'm just accomplishing a checklist of things I feel obligated to do to please Him. This makes my spiritual life more about doing what I need to do to fulfill an obligation than something meaningful. — Joyce Meyer

Her moral obligation
to keep our hearts entwined.
Her preeminent love,
smelling like life,
in a good way,
familiar like an ancient woodcut,
a private postcard in the midst of a crowd,
in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories,
committed to recycling life.

repairing the nucleus. — Brian D'Ambrosio

We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence! — Mark Leyner

Your first obligation, I suppose, is to your God. Your second is to your family. And your third is to your community. And you ought to try to fulfill all of those in your life. — Dick Murphy

I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that. — Ishmael Beah

Your greatest obligation in your use of time is to yourself, so that you are filling the days of your life with the pursuits and activities that reflect your deepest values. Time boundaries protect these pursuits, creating the limits that allow you to interact most fully with what matters to you. When we clutter our lives with imagined obligations, unnecessary activities, and distractions that only kill time, we dilute the power of our lives. You have the ultimate responsibility for the use of your time. At the end of your life, none of the excuses or defenses will matter. What will matter is that you spent your time on the experiences you wanted to have. — Anne Katherine

Life is not about hoarding wealth but about spreading it around. God can act to see to it that the creation is nourished, but he uses us humans to see to it that our fellow humans have their needs met. We live in a world where the poor are daily reminders that we too have an obligation to meet, not only to ourselves but also to one another. In order to do this we, like Jesus, need to eschew three things: comfort, safety and security. — Michael Hardin

He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain. — Marcel Proust

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. — Norbert Wiener

To live forever should not be an obligation. In fact, eternal life should only be for those who wish for it, because if we are depressed and unhappy with our lives, just the idea of living forever is an unbearable source of suffering. — Claude Vorilhon

If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation. — Lysander Spooner

In life I learned that you should not brag, until you've done it And even worse than that.. Could you do it again?? That's why I'm always humble, humbleness is a brave man's obligation, since he knows what it takes to accomplish a great deed — Renzo Gracie

If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting. — Larry Brilliant

You convey too great a compliment when you say that I have earned the right to the presidential nomination. No man can establish such an obligation upon any part of the American people. My country owes me no debt. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor. In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbounded hope. My whole life has taught me what America means. I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay. — Herbert Hoover

By putting "God" and "work" in the same title - in, so to speak, the same breath - Mr. Keeble challenges the modern orthodoxy, which has done its best to keep those terms separate. The great dissociation of which T. S. Eliot and others have spoken has made it likely that people will exclude from their forms of worship any reference to their economic life or the quality of their work, and that they will exclude from their work any sense of religious obligation. By bringing those two words back into their old association, and by the honor he gives to people who conscientiously kept them associated, Mr. Keeble restores to practical viability the idea of good work. He brings again into view the possibility of religion practicable in work, and work compatible with worship and wholly meant. Wendell Berry Lanes Landing Farm Port Royal, Kentucky — Brian Keeble

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