Quotes about responsibility

How can I blame the wind for the mess it made, if it was me who opened the window.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Your wound is not your fault but your healing is your responsibility.

When you're born you look like your parents. When you die you look like your decisions.

Some things are within our control and some things are not. Within our control are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and our actions. Not within our control are our body, property, reputation, and office.

If you wish to improve, be content to appear foolish and stupid regarding externals.

It is not things themselves that trouble us, but our judgements about those things.

The cost of a thing is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.

Greater virtues are required to bear good fortune than bad.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

The best thing you can do for your family, your children, society, and the world around you is to enhance yourself.

When you are able to create yourself the way you want, you can craft your Destiny the way you want as well.

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

If you dig a pit for others to fall into, you will fall into it yourself.

To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

Our characters are the result of our conduct.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

That government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

You are the artist of your own life. Don’t hand the paintbrush to anyone else.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Love is as love does.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Nobody has the right to obey.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Compassion is the basic social emotion.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Existence precedes essence.

Man is condemned to be free.

Hell is other people.

A man's character is his fate.