Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet and from it learn the all.
Was ist deine Pflicht? Die Forderung des Tages=--What is thy duty? To accept the challenge of the passing day.
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.
Our time is fixed, and all our days are numbered; / How long, how short, we know not: this we know, / Duty requires we calmly wait the summons, / Nor dare to stir till Heaven shall give permission.
Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes the man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts in a uniform manner.--_Addison._
Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven.
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 a planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation of those who are to come and point the way.
Those who believe without having read the Old and New Testaments, do so because they have a saintly frame of mind, with which all that they hear of our Religion agrees. They feel that a God has made them; their will is to love God only, their will is to hate themselves only. They feel that they have no power of themselves, that they are unable to come to God, and if God come not to them, they can have no communion with him. And they hear our Religion declare that men must love God only, and hate self only, but that all being corrupt, and unfit for God, God made himself man to unite himself to us. No more is needed to convince men who have such a disposition and have a knowledge of their duty and of their incompetence.
It will not always be easy. To-morrow it may mean a distasteful task, a disagreeable duty, a costly sacrifice for one who does not seem worthy. Life is full of sore testings of our willingness to follow the Good Shepherd. We have not the slightest right to claim this assurance unless we have taken Christ as the guide of our life.--_J. R. Miller._
Instead of approaching the religions of the world with the preconceived idea that they are either corruptions of the Jewish religion, or descended, in common with the Jewish religion, from some perfect primeval revelation, the students of the science of religion have seen that it is their duty first to collect all the evidence of the early history of religious thought that is still accessible in the sacred books of the world, or in the mythology, customs, or even in the languages of various races. Afterwards they have undertaken a genealogical classification of all the materials that have hitherto been collected, and they have then only approached the question of the origin of religion in a new spirit, by trying to find out how the roots of the various religions, the radical concepts which form their foundation, and before all, the concept of the infinite, could have been developed, taking for granted nothing but sensuous perception on one side, and the world by which we are surrounded on the other.
It was the duty of the Apostles and of the early Christians in general to stand forth in the name of the only true God, and to prove to the world that their God had nothing in common with the idols worshipped at Athens and Ephesus. It was the duty of the early converts to forswear all allegiance to their former deities, and if they could not at once bring themselves to believe that the gods whom they had worshipped had no existence at all, they were naturally led on to ascribe to them a kind of demoniacal nature, and to curse them as the offspring of that new principle of Evil with which they had become acquainted in the doctrines of the early Church.... Through the whole of St. Augustine's works, and through all the works of earlier Christian divines, there runs the same spirit of hostility blinding them to all that may be good, and true, and sacred, and magnifying all that is bad, false, and corrupt, in the ancient religions of mankind. Only the Apostles and their immediate disciples venture to speak in a different and, no doubt, in a more truly Christian spirit of the old forms of worships.... What can be more convincing, more powerful, than the language of St. Paul at Athens?
Not once or twice in our rough island-story, / The path of duty was the way to glory: / He that walks it, only thirsting / For the right, and learns to deaden / Love of self, before his journey closes / He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting / Into glossy purples, which outredden / All voluptuous garden-roses.
Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness or a realisation of our duty and privilege as God's children.
Shall it be that of the philosophers, who proposed as the only good the good which is in ourselves? Is this the true good? Have they found a remedy for our evils? Is the pride of man cured by equalling him with God? Have those who would level us to the brutes, or the Mahomedans who present us with pleasures of the world as the sole good, even in eternity, found any remedy for our lusts? What religion then will teach us to cure our pride and our lust? What religion will teach us our good, our duty, the infirmity which turns us from it, the cause of this infirmity, the remedies which can cure it, and the means of obtaining those remedies? All other religions have failed, let us see what the wisdom of God can do.
Of love that never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts; Or all the same as if he had not been?
Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and see nothing but obscurity, nature offers me nothing but matter for doubt and disquiet. Did I see nothing there which marked a Divinity I should decide not to believe in him. Did I see every where the marks of a Creator, I should rest peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny, and too little to affirm, my state is pitiful, and I have a hundred times wished that if God upheld nature, he would mark the fact unequivocally, but that if the signs which she gives of a God are fallacious, she would wholly suppress them, that she would either say all or say nothing, that I might see what part I should take. Instead of this, in my present state, ignorant of what I am, and of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart is wholly bent to know where is the true good in order to follow it, nothing would seem to me too costly for eternity.
You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. … Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.
How numerous the little foxes are! Little compromises with the world; disobedience to the still, small voice in little things; little indulgences of the flesh to the neglect of duty; little strokes of policy; doing evil in little things that good may come; and the beauty, and the fruitfulness of the vine are sacrificed!--_J. Hudson Taylor._
~Haste.~--Let your haste commend your duty.--_Shakespeare._
Count no duty too little, no round of life too small, no work too low, if it come in thy way, since God thinks so much of it as to send His angels to guard thee in it.--_Mark Guy Pearse._
He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.
Whoever . . . prefers the service of princes before his duty to his Creator, will be sure, early or late, to repent in vain.
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 to God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.--_Thomas Paine._
In duty prompt, at every call, / He watch'd, and wept, and felt, and prayed for all.
Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break.
The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
There is no Christian duty that is not to be seasoned and set off with cheerishness,--which in a thousand outward and intermitting crosses may yet be done well, as in this vale of tears.--_Milton._
You can furnish one Christian life. You can furnish a life so faithful to every duty, so ready for every service, so determined not to commit every sin, that the great Christian church shall be the stronger for your living in it, and the problem of the world be answered, and a certain great peace come into this poor, perplexed, phase of our humanity as it sees that new revelation of what Christianity is.--_Phillips Brooks._
Yet this law is at the same time severe and rigorous beyond all others in respect to their religious worship, constraining the people, in order to keep them in their duty, to a thousand peculiar and painful observances, on pain of death. Whence it is a most astonishing fact, that it has been constantly preserved during many ages by a people so rebellious and impatient, while all other states have changed their laws from time to time, although they are far more lenient.
Let no guilty man escape, if it can be avoided. No personal considerations should stand in the way of performing a duty.
A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
His form was of the manliest beauty, His heart was kind and soft; Faithful below he did his duty, But now he 's gone aloft.
If we do a thing because we think it is our duty, we generally fail; that is the old law which makes slaves of us. The real spring of our life, and of our work in life, must be love--true, deep love--not love of this or that person, or for this or that reason, but deep human love, devotion of soul to soul, love of God realised where alone it can be, in love of those whom He loves. Everything else is weak, passes away; that love alone supports us, makes life tolerable, binds the present together with the past and future, and is, we may trust, imperishable.
Gentlemen have to learn that it is no part of their duty or privilege to live on other people's toil; that there is no degradation in the hardest manual or the humblest servile labour, when it is honest.
My soul, art thou living up to thy twofold origin? Art thou remembering thy double parentage, and therefore thy double duty? Thou hast a duty to thy God, for His breath is in thee; thou hast a duty to the earth, for out of it wast thou taken.--_George Matheson._
The least action of life can be as surely done from the loftiest motive as the highest and noblest. Faithfulness measures acts as God measures them. True conscientiousness deals with our duties as God deals with them. Duty is duty, conscience is conscience, right is right, and wrong is wrong, whatever sized type they be printed in. "Large" and "small" are not words for the vocabulary of conscience. It knows only two words--right and wrong.--_Alex. McLaren._
Foy pour devoir=--Faith for duty.
In all situations= (out of Tophet) =there is a duty, and our highest blessedness lies in doing it.
Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
Perish discretion when it interferes with duty.
England expects this day that every man shall do his duty.
For knowledge is a barren tree and bare, / Bereft of God, and duty but a word, / And strength but tyranny, and love, desire, / And purity a folly.
Tyranny is the wishing to have in one way what can only be had in another. Divers duties are owing to divers merits, the duty of love to the pleasant, of fear to the strong, of belief to the wise.
A cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday someday, or some century an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
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.
I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference... We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can!
Wherever your lot is cast, duty to yourself and others suggests the propriety of adapting your conduct to the circumstances in which you are placed.
The first essential responsibility [of the state] is control of the market-place: there must be some official charged with the duty of seeing that honest dealing and good order prevail. For one of the well-nigh essential activities of all states is the buying and selling of goods to meet their mutual basic needs; this is the quickest way to self-sufficiency, which seems to be what moves men to combine under a single constitution. The Politics , Book VI, Chapter viii, §1321b4.
The co-operative principle presents this advantage, that the participation of the workmen in profits tends to give them a motive for working with industry, and using their intelligence as well as their manual labor in promoting the improvement of the business. Each working man will have an interest in doing his own duty, and in seeing that every other workman does the same. In this way the men will have a motive for exercising a superintendence over one another; and a public opinion is likely to be created among the whole body in favour of diligence and good conduct. Another advantage which may be expected, is, that the community of interest which will exist to a certain degree in a co operative association between capitalists and men, and in a more complete manner in an association of workmen alone, will tend to prevent or soften collisions and obstructions to the progress of the business, arising from the pretensions or passions of any of the parties concerned. [ Ibid., “On Cooperation,” Chapter 11.]
Le devoir, c'est l'ame interieure, c'est la vie de l'education=--Duty is the inner soul, the life of education.
The two most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.
Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Of how few lives does not stated duty claim the greater part?
Faire mon devoir=--To do my duty.
The first duty of a host is cheerfulness.
Do the duty which lies nearest to thee. Thy second duty will already have become clearer.
Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.
I do perceive here a divided duty.
When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty. — Norm Crosby
A light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove.
Children should have their times of being off duty, like soldiers.
We all live upon the hope of pleasing somebody; and the pleasure of pleasing ought to be greatest, and at last always will be greatest, when our endeavours are exerted in consequence of our duty.
Nay, let us seek at home to find / Fit harvest for the brooding mind, / And find, since thus the world grows fair, / Duty and pleasure everywhere.
Next to faith in God, the chief duty of man is to treat his fellow men with gentleness and courtesy.
Love can do much, but duty still more.
Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.
Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.
an admitted insensibility or immorality simplifies life as much as does easy virtue; it converts reproachable actions, for which one no longer need seek any excuse, into a duty imposed by sincerity.
To think well of others is a religious duty.
Boni pastoris est tondere pecus, non deglubere=--It is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to flay them. _Tiberius C?sar, in reference to taxation._
For never anything can be amiss, When simpleness and duty tender it.
An example of this can be frequently seen in the fingers, which learn to perform on an instrument the things which the intellect commands, and the lesson once learnt they will perform it without the aid of the intellect. And do not the muscles which cause the legs to move perform their duty without man being conscious of it?
Oh, love for ever lost, / And with it faith gone out! what is't remains / But duty, though the path be rough and trod / By bruised and bleeding feet?
The great duty of life is not to give pain; and the most acute reasoner cannot find an excuse for one who voluntarily wounds the heart of a fellow-creature.
Est etiam miseris pietas, et in hoste probatur=--Regard for the wretched is a duty, and deserving of praise even in an enemy.
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Every one regards his duty as a troublesome master from whom he would like to be free.
Happy he for whom a kind heavenly sun brightens the ring of necessity into a ring of duty.
~Reputation.~--Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it is, as Mr. Burke calls it, "the cheap defence and ornament of nations, and the nurse of manly exertions;" it produces more labor and more talent then twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius; and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy.--_Sydney Smith._
The practice of that which is ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it: and shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to live. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to the community, to the protection and influence of which he owes, if not existence itself, at least the life of something better than a brutal savage.
One futile person, that maketh it his glory to tell, will do more hurt than many that know it their duty to conceal.
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.
If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.