top of page
.png){kind=small}
Responsibility Quotes
"I am so often the architect of my own pain and the engineer of my own failures."
3
"I do not hurt people, they just make me do it."
3
"Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore, should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were no sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive the day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare."
3
"You are the grand estate and administrator of - now."
3
"No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality."
2
"You can renew your mind by filling it with the Word of God."
2
"Unfortunately the leading proponent of ignorance in our society has become the very same institution that was created to fight it - The Church."
2
"Christians don't have the moral right to be indifferent."
2
"Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be."
2
"When I look inside myself, I find I am to blame,For everything that I've done wrong,And said others were to blame."
2
"I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men-for certain people-to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents."
2
"The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved."
2
"They that milk the cow everyday without feeding it well must never complain about how it keeps growing lean."
2
"Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment."
2
"I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did. I don't."
2
"When I say maturity, I mean an inner integrity. And this inner integrity comes only when you stop making others responsible, when you stop saying that the other is creating your suffering, when you start realizing that you are the creator of your suffering. This is the first step towards maturity: I am responsible. Whatsoever is happening, it is my doing.You feel sad. Is this your doing? You will feel very much disturbed, but if you can remain with this feeling, sooner or later you will be able to stop doing many things. This is what the theory of karma is all about. You are responsible. Don't say society is responsible, don't say that parents are responsible, don't say the economic conditions are responsible, don't throw the responsibility onto anybody. YOU are responsible."
2
"Stop blaming God for your decisions."
2
"Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In The Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a "glorious" experiment - the "completing of the Creation." The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like "completion" can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But, perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge."
2
"Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves."
2
"I was just cleaning up my own mess, Baz. Like, no one would call you a hero for cleaning up your own vomit."
2
"I assumed my first undivided responsibility."
2
"We become responsible for the actions of others the instant we become conscious of what they are doing wrong and fail to remind them of what is right."
2
"I left a pause. 'You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.' 'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."
2
"You can't run away from home without destroying somebody's world."
2
"Man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice- that is an axiom."
2
"Be careful, though.""Aren't I always?""No, I think the word for how you usually are is 'reckless."
2
"We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That's a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility."
2
"I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living."
2
"People with responsibility and people without responsibility are sorry for each other."
2
"I have two great duties in each day: firstly, to identify why I woke up and secondly to be convinced of why I must retire!"
2
"Humankind's amazing grace is the ability to choose right from wrong, and assume personal responsibility for our conduct. With the judicious exercise of composure and appliance of self-discipline, we exceed our humble origins and blossom into a final rendering of whatever type of person we aspire to become."
2
"Laziness has made our cities unclean. If we begin to work and act appropriately, we will clean our cities of any dirt."
2
"Maybe it's a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we're all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we're all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place."
2
"Nobody is responsible for your sorrows and poverty, not even the devil. It is the work of the enemies of time that lives in some men, and their names are, 'Laziness and Procrastination'."
2
"A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection."
2
"God doesn't punish us.We do that all by ourselves."
2
"Your responsibility is to not question God's actions or what looks like a lack of action. Your obligation is to count on God's character."
2
"Why can't I do it? [Isabel] asked."Do what?"Just forget about everything. Just go somewhere and get smashed and pretend like there are no problems or consequences. I know why. Because there are still problems and consequences. And going and--and--partying doesn't make them go away. I feel like I'm the only sane person in the world. I don't get why this whole world runs on stupidity."
2
"Do not wait for the government to provide solutions to the people when you can be their answer."
2
"It's easy to make a mess when you're not the one who has to clean it up."
2
"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
2
"Your right actions might hurt someone, so if required apologize for your right actions, but don't stop taking right actions."
2
"If you follow the rules, it's your own fault."
2
"In the war, to survive, you had to be responsible every minute of every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every action. You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival wasn't something that could be achieved alone. That's maybe the one positive thing about fighting in a war - it clarifies your thinking and makes you realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates good men from the damned."
2
"There are no free passes in life, outcomes will always mirror the input."
2
"You care because God gave you this unusual blessing: a burden to make a difference."
2
"I stole their future from them, I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past."
2
"The devil may not be interested in preventing you from knowing the undone job. What he may do is to make you think it's somebody's job and not yours."
2
"A man can never be truly free when he knows that he is neglecting his duties elsewhere."
2
bottom of page