Obliged Quotes - Page 17

• Men are not only prone to forget benefits; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury, or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Hate, Men, Benefits

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• Painters and poets are obliged to exaggerate the proportions of their figures in order to give true perspective.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Art, Order, Giving

  Mahatma Gandhi (1997). “The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941”, National Book Trust India

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• You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.

  Octave Mirbeau

  Fashion, Anger, Thinking

  Octave Mirbeau (1989). “The Torture Garden”, Re-Search Publications

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• With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable. I cannot... I cannot come to each of you but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.

  George Washington

  Gratitude, Appreciation, Heart

  George Washington (1852). “The life of General Washington: first president of the United States”, p.115

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• No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

  David Berlinski

  Men, Might, Has Beens

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• You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.

  Alejandro Jodorowsky

  Accompany You, Madness, Feels

  Alejandro Jodorowsky (2008). “The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo”, p.183, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

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• The greatest embarrassment of my political career has been that active duties seem to deprive me of time for careful investigation. I seem almost obliged to form conclusions from impressions instead of from study.... I wish that I had more knowledge, more thorough acquaintance, with the matters involved.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Careers, Political, Wish

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link (1977). “The Papers of Woodrow Wilson”

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• A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
  An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle.

  Mo Willems

  Sexy, Fun, Book

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• We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.

  Barbara Kruger

  Pieces, Language, Stealing

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• The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Fighting, Tanks, Division

  Kurt Vonnegut (2008). “Armageddon in Retrospect”, p.14, Penguin

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• Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.... Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness.

  George Orwell

  Sweat, Sound, Pay

  George Orwell (2012). “Down and Out in Paris and London”, p.57, Lulu.com

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• A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith.

  Marilynne Robinson

  People, Listening, Assuming

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  May, Wander, Left

  Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (2015). “The Spirit of Laws”, p.385, Library of Alexandria

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• Hath God obliged himself not to exceed the bounds of our knowledge?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Exceed, Bounds

  Michel de Montaigne (1964). “Selected essays of Montaigne: in the translation of John Florio”

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• A complete transformation seemed to have place in my life overnight. It was quite staggering, and thenceforward visitors and invitations continued to pour in daily until they became a source of grievance to our landlady, who was obliged to engage an extra servant to respond to the battering of powdered footmen on her humble and somewhat flimsy door.

  Lillie Langtry

  Humble, Doors, Visitors

  Lillie Langtry (2000). “The Days I Knew”, p.37, Panoply Publications

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• Anyone who believes in the natural and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is obliged to accept that individuals have the right to buy and sell alcohol. That's why all the regulations that people take for granted-the restrictions on hours of operation, the ban on Sunday sales, the minimum distance from schools and churches, the minimum age, and the protection of local wineries from competition by wineries in other states-are illegitimate.

  Sheldon Richman

  Distance, Believe, School

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• No hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.

  Thomas Piketty

  Hypocrisy, Financial, Economic

  Thomas Piketty (2014). “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, p.514, Harvard University Press

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• Take a dose of medicine once, and in all probability you will be obliged to take an additional hundred afterwards

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Medicine, Hundred, Probability

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• The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  World, Scar, Brushes

  Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1987). “Henri Cartier-Bresson, the early work”

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• No country can allow its safety to be wholly dependent on faithful observance by other states of rules to which they are obliged.

  Arthur Balfour

  Country, Safety, Faithful

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• I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don't think there is any obligation to be clever at all.

  Garrison Keillor

  Clever, Thinking, Past

  "Humor has to surprise us, otherwise it isn't funny". Interview with George Plimpton, blankonblank.org. November 28, 1994.

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• If, in order to succeed in an enterprise, I were obliged to choose between fifty deer commanded by a lion, and fifty lions commanded by a deer, I should consider myself more certain of success with the first group than with the second.

  Vincent de Paul

  Order, Groups, Lions

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• The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.

  Bernard Levin

  Patient, Metaphor, Results

  Bernard Levin (1986). “In these times”, Jonathan Cape

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• We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to 'like' one another. Love governs the will: 'liking' is a matter of sense and sensibility. Nevertheless, if we really love others it will not be too hard to like them also.

  Thomas Merton

  Matter, Love One Another, Nevertheless

  Thomas Merton (2002). “No Man Is an Island”, p.193, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income,for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Believe, School, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.50, Graphic Arts Books

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