Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

While still unable to do your duty to the living, how can you do your duty to the dead?... Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?

Death | Duty | Life | Life | Understanding | Understand |

Dag Hammarskjöld

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

Duty | Life | Life | Position | Receive | Right |

Dag Hammarskjöld

To let oneself be bound by a duty from the moment you see it approaching is part of the integrity that alone justifies responsibility.

Duty | Integrity | Responsibility |

Duncan Stuart

It is one's duty to make the most of the best that is in him.

Duty |

Francis Bacon

In terms of religion, it is man’s duty to continue his quest for truth, especially with regard to the afterlife.

Afterlife | Duty | Man | Regard | Religion | Truth |

Francis Bacon

Duty is subdivided into two parts: the common duty of every man, as a man or member of a state; the other, the respective or special duty of every man, in his profession, vocation, and place.

Duty | Man |

George Bernard Shaw

This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing.

Body | Children | Duty | Education | Good | Love | Men | Torture | Wise | World |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In duty the individual finds his liberation; liberation from independence on mere natural impulse.

Duty | Impulse | Individual |

George Bernard Shaw

Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

Duty | Means | Progress | Scripture |

George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne

Man is an animal, formidable both from his passions and his reasons; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes, in short to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavor of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education.

Duty | Education | Fear | Good | Justice | Man | Means | Men | Method | Model | Order | Reason | Sense | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Wise |

George MacDonald

The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, the last duty well done.

Duty | Future | Present |

George Washington

The consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former by inculcating the practice of the latter.

Consideration | Duty | Practice | Progress | Will | Happiness |

George Washington

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.

Duty | Government | Individual | People | Power | Right | Time | Government |

George Washington

To persevere in one's duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.

Calumny | Duty |

Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.

Duty | Experience | Vision |

George Washington

Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

Duty | Happiness |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

The whole duty of life is implied in the question, how to respire and aspire both at once.

Duty | Life | Life | Question |

Henry Ward Beecher

Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.

Duty | Men | Respect | Self |

Immanuel Kant

If we attend to the experience of men’s conduct, we meet frequent and, as we ourselves allow, just complaints that one cannot find a single certain example of the disposition to act from pure duty. Although many things are done in conformity with what duty prescribes, it is nevertheless always doubtful whether they are done strictly from duty, so as to have moral worth.

Conduct | Conformity | Duty | Example | Experience | Men | Worth |