A Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

Gustave Flaubert

Quote Topics

Accept Always Am Beautiful Blockheads Cherish Constantly Conventions Duty Ears Feel Flannel Foot Great Ignominy Lot Old Our Sick Society Us Vests Women Word

Quote Author

Gustave Flaubert
French - Novelist
December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

Gustave Flaubert

Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the former is done

William Graham Sumner

Kant does not think there is anything wrong with being beneficent from sympathy. He thinks we have a duty to cultivate sympathetic feelings by participating in the situations of others and acquiring an understanding of them. He thinks we also have a duty to make ourselves into the kind of person for whom the recognition that something is our duty would be a sufficient incentive to do it (if no other incentives were available to us). That's what he means by "the duty to act from the motive of duty".

Allen W. Wood

The president's duty to faithfully execute his office includes not only a duty of loyalty to the nation but also a duty of care - a duty to act with reasonable diligence and upon a reasonable basis.

George T. Conway III

I consider it a public duty to answer falsifications with facts. I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty. I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The sense of obligation to continue is present in all of us. A duty to strive is the duty of us all. I felt a call to that duty.

Abraham Lincoln

I am sick and tired of hearing that it is our moral duty to serve the state, because conservatives believe that it is our moral duty to serve our fellow man regardless of race, sex, affiliation or creed, and when we serve, we believe that it is the state's duty to get out of the way.

Allen West

A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.

Daniel Webster

Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Mark Twain

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

One single vision fills all minds: that of our independence endangered. One single duty imposes itself upon our wills: the duty of stubborn resistance.

Albert II of Belgium

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

Douglas MacArthur

The old women only stuck around this long out of a sense of duty. Your mom was the same way. That's why I loved her. She put her duty first, ahead of evverything.