'Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice', should be a woman's motto henceforward.

-Stanton, Elizabeth ne¤  e  Cady
  TheWoman's Bible, pt.2,'Comments on Mark'.

The duty of a journalist is the duty of a watchman.

-Stead,WilliamThomas
  'Government byJournalism', in the Contemporary Review, May. Collected in A Journalist onJournalism (1892).

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.

-Sterne, Laurence
^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.1, ch.1.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Virginibus Puerisque,'An Apology for Idlers'.

It was my duty to have loved the highest; It surely was my profit had I known: It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Lancelot, nor another.

-Tennyson
  Idylls of the King,'Guinevere', l.652^6.

And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace; But he rose upon their decks, and he cried: 'I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true; I have only done my dutyas a man is bound to do: With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die!' And he fell upon their decks, and he died.

-Tennyson
  'The Revenge', stanza13, l.99^104.

The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and bydisclosing them, to makethemthe common property of the nation.

-TheTimes
  Leading article, 6 Feb.

The primary duty of a serious biographer is to illuminate hissubject'slife work, nottoplay thespy inhisbedroom.

-Toynbee, (Theodore) Philip
  Book review in the Observer,18 Mar.

The duty of a democracy is to know then what it knows now.

-White, E(lwyn) B(rooks)
  One Man's Meat,'One Man's Meat'.

   If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch.4.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
Intentions,'The Critic as Artist'.

Henry James wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
Attributed.