Duties

Famous quotes containing the word duties:

    Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a “taxing- machine;” to the contented, a “machine for securing property.” Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
    Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

    The intent of matrimony, is not for man and wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their family with prudence, and educate their children with discretion.
    Anonymous, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. Weekly Visitor or Ladies Miscellany (June 1807)

    It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)