Optimizing your strength is not optional, it's an obligation.

As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation.

I mean No is power. No says, I'm in charge. Think about how many times you've said yes in the past year, and how many times you would've liked to have said no instead. Maybe being able to say no is the one thing that keeps us sane. Some people go through their whole lives saying yes over and over again--yes to things they don't want to do but feel obliged to; yes to things that allow other people to take advantage of them, just because that's the way things are, the way things have always been. Some people need to learn how to say no. Because every time they say yes, they say no to themselves.

Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.

If you walk around proudly when someone greets you with respect or says, —welcome, welcome', you will suffer a loss, right? Here, it was the other person's duty [social obligation] to welcome you, but you shouldn't fall short. So you should immediately check your balance-sheet (of karma) to find out where you sustained a loss!

The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.

Benefits received are a delight to us as long as we think we can requite them; when that possibility is far exceeded, they are repaid with hatred instead of gratitude.

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.

We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who owe us more than we wish.

Too great an eagerness to discharge an obligation is a species of ingratitude.

Pride does not wish to owe, and self-love does not wish to pay.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

We cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefits we receive must be rendered again line for line, deed for deed to somebody.