Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
Who combats bravely is not therefore brave,
He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave:
Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise,--
His pride in reasoning, not in acting lies.
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
In the first days
Of my distracting grief, I found myself
As women wish to be who love their lords.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
'T was only that when he was off he was acting.
Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect.
If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes,--some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,--and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.
Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,--
The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife....
The hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,
Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent and desperate part.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting 'Twas only that when he was off, he was acting.
Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
Acting is happy agony.
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action.. You must act as you breathe.
Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.
As for what the Church thinks and says, what influence does that have on the handling of American politics, the conduct of American education, the regulation of marriage and divorce, on sex and drink, on how industrial disputes are settled, on how we carry on business? As a plain matter of fact, religion in this country is generally regarded as a tolerated pastime for such people as happen to like to indulge in occasional godly exercisesâas a strictly private matter in an increasingly close-knit and socially acting societyâin other words, as something that does not count. I should like to see the Church recognize that it has been pushed into the realm of the non-essentials, and to persuade it to fight like fury for the right and the duty to bring every act of America and Americans before the bar of God's judgment. [Christian leaders] are making valiant claim to such a right and duty; but the great mass of Church members are content to regard the Church as a conglomerate of private culture clubs, nice for christenings, weddings and funerals. Most Church members readily agree with the unchurched majority that it is not the proper business of the Church to criticize America or Americans.
Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.
A baby sitter is a teenager acting like an adult while the adults are out acting like teenagers.
It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.
We are given one life, and the decision is our whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.