A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire. — © Ambrose Bierce
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
People think of time as a continuum composed of points which is stretched out at a line, and even if you add a direction to it and say one direction on the line is past and the other direction is future, or better, one direction is "earlier than" and the other direction is "later than", you're still thinking of it as like a geometrical line which is stretched out rather than as a dynamic process of becoming.
It is faith, and not reason, which impels men to action... Intelligence is content to point out the road, but never drives us along it.
True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them the desire to do right is precisely the same.
The bottom line is that the human body is complex and subtle, and oversimplifying - as common sense sometimes impels us to do - can be hazardous to your health.
The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
Desires to which we cling closely can easily prevent us from being what we ought to be and can be; and on the other hand, desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer.Lack of desire is poverty.
When you are in the line of your duty, it is like standing in front of a line of posts, and every post is in line. But step one step aside, and every post looks as though it were not quite in line. The farther you get away from that straight line, the more crooked the posts will appear. It is the straight and narrow path of duty that will lead you and me back to the presence of God.
The principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our conditiona desire which?comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave.
By doing well the duty which is nearest to us, the duty which is in our hands, we make ourselves stronger
Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us.
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
Today, National Geographic has a membership side with a magazine and some television side, and they generate about a billion dollars in revenue, and they're profitable. And so at the end of the year they have some bottom line profit which they can then reinvest, because they're running it as a not-for-profit in charitable endeavors.
The many of us who attain what we may and forget those who help us along the line we've got to remember that there are so many others to pull along the way. The farther they go, the further we all go.
At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.
Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.
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