Voluntary Commitment Quotes

Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

The Giving Pledge is not meant to be prescriptive or restrictive.

I will admit no bond that holds me to a party a day longer than I agree to its principles

Look for someone who has a complete life without you in it. If you have a person you don't need for anything, that's ideal. You're just together because you really want to be.

Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest. Love of country must spring from willing hearts and free minds.

All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.

The United States government is the most powerful entity in the world, but even it does not have the power to force a single child to make any pledge or take any oath that he or she does not want to say or take.

I fell in love with him. But I don't just stay with him by default as if there's no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.

I do not believe that I'm sacrificing, in fact I feel very uneasy when others used the word sacrifice to describe my life. It sounds like I'm demanding returns for my investments. I chose to walk on this journey, because I solely believed in it and wholeheartedly decided to do so, and I'm willing and able to pay for the consequences.

Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.

Legality can't create love if it isn't there, or preserve it if it's dying, but it can destroy love by making it compulsory.

We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we are under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in.

Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and gratitude the most humiliating, affection of the mind. We never reflect on the man we love without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some measure forfeited our freedom.