Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.

I'm thankful my parents obliged me to live with the unvarnished truth: I might not have been a looker, but I was a better speller than the prettiest girl in my class, and I was funnier, too.

May those who enjoy the faithful ministry of the Word feel exceedingly thankful for it. There are few blessings on Earth greater for a believer; and yet the Lord is frequently obliged to teach us the value of this blessing by depriving us of it for a season.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Your patience would fail you if I should continue to relate all the disrespectful speeches and treatment which your servants have been obliged to listen to and patiently to bear.

After a long, impartial enquiry of the truth, and after much and earnest calling upon God, to give unto me the spirit and revelation in the knowledge of Him, I find myself obliged, both by the principles of reason and Scripture, to embrace the opinion I now hold forth.

For the sake of our interests, as well as of our honour and dignity, we were obliged to see that we won for our international policy the same independence that we had secured for our European policy.

Out of my desire to complete Iraq's independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete.

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.

The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.

I realized that everything I had to do I could not do on my own, and so I was almost obliged to put myself in God's hands, to trust in Jesus who - while I wrote my book on him - I felt bound to by an old and more profound friendship.

I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all.

My hearing has suffered seriously; just now I am obliged to have the assistance of an ear trumpet. Think of that, my beauty! - There 's a state for your old Lover to be in! - No more tender whisperings! Imagine sweet confessions to be made through an ear trumpet!

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

Thus Adelaide Lee was born of poor luck and poverty and raised by ignorance and solitude. Let this ignoble origin story stand as an invaluable lesson to you that a person's beginnings do not often herald their endings, for Adelaide Lee did not grow into another pale Larson woman. She became something else entirely, something so radiant and wild and fierce that a single world could not contain her, and she was obliged to find others.

" The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was "seized with a violent trembling," as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet's spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence.

Feel not obliged to make good use of every ripe fruit on the vine.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.