quotations about obedience
I cannot make my kids obey. But I can control my responses to their disobedience--that is, I can respect their choices and provide wise consequences for their actions, so they can learn just as much about wisdom from disobeying as from obeying. And I can respond in ways that create an environment in which their poor choices are their problem.
JEFF VANVONDEREN
Families Where Grace Is In Place
Every now and then I like to do as I'm told, just to confuse people.
TAMORA PIERCE
Melting Stones
You moralistic dog--admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
The obedience of the heart is the heart of obedience.
T. ADAMS
attributed, Day's Collacon
There are few things as nauseating as pure obedience.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
The Name of the Wind
One so small
Who knowing nothing knows but to obey.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Small Gods
None of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.
JOHANN BAPTIST METZ
Poverty of Spirit
Though a god I have learned to obey the times.
PALLADAS
Palatine Anthology
She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.
ELIZABETH GOUDGE
The Scent of Water
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
DAVID HUME
"Of the First Principles of Government", Essays Literary, Moral and Political
The life doth prove the precept, who obey shall happy be,
Who will not serve the sovereign, be hanged on fatal tree.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine"
I have always tried to be obedient regarding important matters like not being scalded to death by burning oil, but when public opinion takes a route far from one's inner conviction, one cannot value disobedience too highly.
BARBARA DANA
A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson
Whenever Papa said, "Jump," I was always the first one in the air.
ANN B. ROSS
Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind
Obedience is a womanly virtue.
DAMO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Obedience is the soul resting on the bosom of God--the law of harmony--the voice of God to a moral mind.
T. BINNEY
attributed, Day's Collacon
Obedience is the key to every door.
GEORGE MACDONALD
The Marquis of Lossie
Obedience, as it regards the social relations, the laws of society, and the laws of nature and of nature's God, should commence at the cradle and end only at the tomb.
HOSEA BALLOU
Treasury of Thought
Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are ... the most serious obstacles to reform.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Civil Disobedience