Top 100 The First Duty Quotes
#1. The first duty of a man is to love himself. When someone loves himself, he is loving the universe. This universe is existing because of you.
Debasish Mridha
#2. If the function of the artist is to see, the first duty of the critic is to understand what the artist saw.
J. E. H. MacDonald
#3. The first duty is to sacrifice to the gods and pray them to grant you the thought,words, and deeds likely to render your command most pleasing to the gods and bring yourself, your friends, and your city the fullest measure of affection and glory and advantage
Xenophon
#4. The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.
Andre Malraux
#5. To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.
Sigmund Freud
#6. It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#7. The first duty of a government is to give education to the people
Simon Bolivar
#8. In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well.
Jean Toomer
#9. The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.
Oscar Wilde
#11. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
Donna Tartt
#12. The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
Abbie Hoffman
#13. Nobody was born nonviolent. No one was born charitable. None of us comes to these things by nature but only by conversion. The first duty of the nonviolent community is helping its members work upon themselves and come to conversion.
Lanza Del Vasto
#14. As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all.
Romain Rolland
#15. The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
Thomas Carlyle
#17. The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not trade; character, not technicalities.
Winston Churchill
#18. To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.
C.S. Lewis
#20. The first duty of any Christian is to know God and the wisdom of His Word to the utmost
Sunday Adelaja
#21. The first duty of wine is to be red. Don't talk to me of your white wines.
Henri Murger
#22. I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!
Slavoj Zizek
#23. I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.
E.B. White
#24. The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#25. I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
Virginia Woolf
#26. We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. GEORGE ORWELL
J. Budziszewski
#27. The first duty of the agriculturalist must always be to understand that he is a part of Nature and cannot escape from his environment. He must therefore obey Nature's rules.
Albert Howard
#28. The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it be accurate, it follows that it is fair.
Herbert Bayard Swope
#29. The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
John Ruskin
#31. The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society
more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#32. The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.
Alexis Carrel
#33. The first duty of a man is to think for himself
Jose Marti
#34. The making of one's life into art is, after all, the first duty and privilege of every man.
Arthur Symons
#35. The first duty of man is to support himself - to see to it that he does not become a burden. His next duty is to help others if he has a surplus, and if he really believes they deserve to be helped.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#36. Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
George Orwell
#38. The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.
W. Somerset Maugham
#39. Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue. And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil.
Andrew Murray
#40. The first duty of the educator, whether he is involved with the newborn infant or the older child, is to recognize the human personality of the young being and respect it.
Maria Montessori
#41. To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later.
Brander Matthews
#42. The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
John Ruskin
#43. The first duty to children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that.
Charles Buxton
#44. The first duty of the sovereign [is] that of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies, [which] can be performed only by means of a military force
Adam Smith
#46. I can't possibly put myself in his [Tony Blair's] shoes and be inside his head but what I can say is that the security of the nation is the first duty of any government but at the same time for me going to war would always be the last resort. I would exhaust all other opportunities first.
Andrea Leadsom
#47. The first duty of an Author is
I conceive
a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.
Charlotte Bronte
Juliet Barker
#50. The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe ...
Thorstein Veblen
#51. I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.
-Poul_Anderson
Poul Anderson
#53. The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but its Master.
P.T. Forsyth
#55. The body is a boat that carries the soul in the ocean of the world. If it is not strong, or it has a hole, then it cannot cross the ocean, so the first duty is to fix the boat.
Baba Hari Dass
#56. Parents need to listen as much to their kids as they do to them: "The first duty of love is to listen."
Paul Tillich
#57. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains
Kurt Vonnegut
#59. National security is the first duty of government but we are also committed to reversing the substantial erosion of civil liberties.
Theresa May
#60. To penetrate the unknown, the mind must begin with what is known already. George Orwell wrote that "We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." This book is an attempt at re-statement.
J. Budziszewski
#61. Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge.
Ford Madox Ford
#62. The first duty of the gospel preacher is to declare God's law and to show the nature of sin.
Martin Luther
#63. To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself
that is the first duty of the educator.
Maria Montessori
#64. Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
#65. The first duty of man is to take none of the principles of conduct upon trust; to do nothing without a clear and individual conviction that it is right to be done.
William Godwin
#66. The care of the public health is the first duty of the statesman.
Benjamin Disraeli
#67. The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
James Anthony Froude
#68. The first duty of an American citizen, then, is that he shall work in politics.
Theodore Roosevelt
#69. The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order so that the life, property, and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
#70. The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going.
Abbie Hoffman
#71. It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.
Thomas Huxley
#72. It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
Ian McEwan
#73. Whether you are doing it in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and enhance life.
Carlos Santana
#74. This is the first duty of parents, and no false delicacy should keep them from the watchful care, the gentle warning, which makes self-knowledge and self-control the compass and pilot of the young as they leave the safe harbour of home.
Louisa May Alcott
#75. This then is the first duty of an educator: to stir up life but leave it free to develop.
Maria Montessori
#76. Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.
Norman Douglas
#77. Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.
Rick Perlstein
#78. The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.
George Bernard Shaw
#79. You might say that I was the first and caused others to awaken to the sense of their duty in helping deserving causes for the benefit of the race.
Madam C. J. Walker
#80. Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.
Leland Stanford
#81. In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother's first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
Charlotte Mason
#82. Man's rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
Samuel Adams
#83. This is the way to cultivate courage: First, by standing firm on some conscientious principle, some law of duty. Next, by being faithful to truth and right on small occasions and common events. Third, by trusting in God for help and power.
James Freeman Clarke
#84. Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.
Herman Melville
#85. I believe that the Government's first duty is to defend its citizens, to defend them against the harms that come out of hate.
Gordon Smith
#86. Ill-luck is, in nine cases out of ten, the result of taking pleasure first and duty second, instead of duty first and pleasure second.
Theodore T. Munger
#87. The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.
Jules Michelet
#88. Combat duty is strenuous and physically demanding, and I'm not the first person to notice that men and women are built differently. And while many will argue that women will only be allowed into combat arms units under the same requirements as their male counterparts, count me as skeptical.
Pete Hegseth
#89. If ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who's not after your soul.
Ayn Rand
#90. God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
George Eliot
#91. The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian-especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the kingdom of God.
Dallas Willard
#92. My mother's studies stopped with the third year of primary school, my father with the first. They taught me a deep sense of duty. But nobody was involved in politics in my family.
Emma Bonino
#93. Woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself.
Matilda Joslyn Gage
#94. Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. If we understand our first and sole duty to consist of loving God supremely and loving everyone, even our enemies, for God's dear sake, then we can enjoy spiritual tranquility under every circumstance.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#95. In all common ordinary cases, we see intuitively at first view what is out duty, what is the honest part. This is the ground of the observation, that the first thought is often the best. In these cases, doubt and deliberation is itself dishonesty; as it was in Balaam upon the second message.
Joseph Butler
#96. Never forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty.
Lee Child
#97. The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
Theodore Roosevelt
#98. [Our] first and foremost duty [is] to seek the Lord until we open the path of communication from God to our own soul.
Brigham Young
#99. A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first.
Mark Twain
#100. Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.
Henri Frederic Amiel
