He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.
It is true from early habit, one must make love mechanically as one swims; I was once very fond of both, but now as I never swim unless I tumble into the water, I don't make love till almost obliged.
Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.
No man is obliged to be what he might have been.
If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.
We are unprofitable servants, we have done what we were obliged to do.
Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.
It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most.
I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.
I don't have any particular rituals, I sometimes like to write in longhand when I'm searching for ideas but I do the vast majority by typing, I can't always keep up with my thoughts longhand. I'm not a coffee shop writer because I feel obliged to order more coffee and then I end up over-caffeinated.
Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
The devotee of truth is often obliged to grope in the dark.
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.
If you're looking for like, a pure base for your behavior on stage, maybe it's better to say, "Yeah, you're not obliged to pretend. But, you're also obliged to not pretend. " So you have access to both sides, if you will. It's never a pure binary thing, but you can pretend. If you have total agency as a performer, then both are at your disposal.
No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
Much as I venerate the name of Newton, I am not obliged to believe that he was infallible. I see. . . with regret that he was liable to err, and that his authority has, perhaps, sometimes even retarded the progress of science.
What would become of the world without the Devil? Under all the different systems of religion that have guided or misguided the world for the last six thousand years, the Devil has been the grand scapegoat. He has had to bear the blame of every thing that has gone wrong. All the evil that gets committed is laid to his door, and he has, besides, the credit of hindering all the good that has never got done at all. If mankind were not thus one and all victims to the Devil, what an irredeemable set of scoundrels they would be obliged to confess themselves!
In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?