Obligations Quotes

“What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.”
― Alain de Botton

“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

“Guilt could be as simple as that. There didn't have to be anything maudlin or self-pitying about it. It was a fact and you lived with the consequences, a kind of contract under which your actions led to inevitable obligations.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

“When we came and rented the North Perth home, my father had a little ice chest, and on top of the ice chest was a radio. And we were sitting at our lunch time on Sunday eating dinner after church, and my Mum says, ‘Look where we’ve ended up. We’ve got a table cloth on our table, we’ve got food on our plate, and we’re listening to music.’ That was a big thing for my mother. - Mrs Helen Doropoulos, Greece”
― Peter Brune, Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66

“Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage

“It sounded somewhat doom-laden, so I felt obliged to look it up more thoroughly, in case I should eat some chocolate rather quickly.”
― Carol Anne Dobson

“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, A Good Girl

“To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men, including intellectuals, and including even those who think of themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt

“For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She's wreckage. It's as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.”
― Charles Baxter, There's Something I Want You to Do

“He needed to get away from the rush of the city, from the unceasing noise and annoying obligations.”
― Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind

“We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations--visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment.”
― Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

“And here before me stands a marvelously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I knew to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. we are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet very necessary; we have obligations above what is merely personal, and to let personal feelings obscure the obligations would be failing in one's duty.

This was clearer still afterward, at lunch at the Savoy....; they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, nor yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it--a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another. We cast them in roles, and it is only right to consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life--unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage.”
― Anita Brookner, The Debut

“Dharma – the foundation of all human goals be,
Refers to obligations, conduct, moral duties;
- 25 -”
― Munindra Misra, Goals of Life

“Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.”
― Jill Lepore

“I don't have enough time. I am being pulled in too many directions. Someone or something is stealing my time. Whether you complain that you are overworked and overextended or you believe that other people, obligations, or competing loyalties are forcing you to postpone or cancel your own aspirations or dreams, you're basically saying one thing: you are inefficient. Yes, it's your fault. It's bullshit and you can change that.”
― Jon Taffer, Don't Bullsh*t Yourself!: Crush the Excuses That Are Holding You Back

“It's a hard thing, balancing your obligation to the family who supported you, who loves you, and the desires of your heart.”
― Melanie A. Smith, The Safeguarded Heart Complete Series

“In the early 1960s, Rawls wrote that the injustices of Jim Crow were not a topic for philosophical discussion. The morality of Jim Crow was clear-cut in its brutal injustice. The circle around Rawles was more concerned with what Isaiah Berlin declared the 'most fundamental of all political questions' - the problem of political obligation, and its mirror, disobedience. Ethical philosophers concerned with finding a moral basis for the rules of society now looked for a moral basis for breaking them.”
― Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy

“Life is not a list of tasks but moments of experiences.”
― Lebo Grand

“Life is about juggling obligations, Valerie. You need to study smarter, not harder.”
― Caroline Hanson, Love is Darkness

“Every Christian leader is oblige to teach their members how to work and bring about productivity.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“By holding out to the people a new right—the right to vote—it becomes possible set on them a radically new duty, a duty that no peasant population would have so readily accepted: the duty to wage war. This was always the justification of the nobility's privilege: they ruled because they fought, and they fought because they ruled.”
― Daniel Schwindt

“There is no place for this story in our culture, no easy and acceptable way to acknowledge the man who loves and cares for his disabled wife while loving and living with another woman with whom he wants the full and committed relationship of husband and wife. There is no point in saying that there should be a place for this story – that in another time or culture there might have been. The individuals involved, and their friends and families, our part of this culture, here and now. Most important, there is no place for the story within Roger, and trying to live it is tearing him apart; it may well result in a breakdown from which he cannot recover.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer

“If you could strip away all your distraction and obligations, who would you be left with?”
― Adam J. Kurtz, You Are Here (For Now): A Guide to Finding Your Way

“Mostly, his obligations appear to be allowing his ring-covered hands to be kissed and accepting the blandishments of the Folk. I'm sure he enjoys that part of it- the kisses, the bowing and scraping. He's certainly enjoying the wine.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“In terms of pure and humble objective morality, a right just feels right to have; however a privilege is, in a way, sort of in the way, and almost feels wrong to have (by principle that if you abuse it, you lose it).”
― Criss Jami

“Now she glanced at the piles of books and papers on her desk. There are no chains, she thought, except those we create for ourselves. That, of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others--or that desks created, she thought...”
― Alexander McCall Smith Peter Bailey, The Novel Habits of Happiness

“...obligation is the worst thing in the world, the freedom we deny ourselves.”
― José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis