Quotes

Quotes about Action


Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Mahatma Gandhi

Character isn't inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains. -Helen Douglas.

Helen Douglas

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

What exactly is success? For me it is to be found not in applause, but in the satisfaction of feeling that one is realizing one's ideal.

Anna Pavlova

The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.

Edgar Watson Howe

The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

Anthony Burgess

It does at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite than a farmer who in conducting his team. - Isaac D'Israeli,

Isaac D'Israeli

Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.

Harold S. Geneen

You do not have enough data to assign value to any action in the book Starseed Transmissions.

Ken Carey

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take— choose the bolder.

William Joseph Slim

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take--choose the bolder.

W. J. Slim

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumnity, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principal has taken full effect on this state favorite.

Isaac D'Israeli

Thou should'st be carolling thy Maker's praise, Poor bird! now fetter'd, and here set to draw, With graceless toil of beak and added claw, The meagre food that scarce thy want allays! And this--to gratify the gloating gaze Of fools, who value Nature not a straw, But know to prize the infraction of her law An hard perversion of her creatures' ways! Thee the wild woods await, in leaves attired, Where notes of liquid utterance should engage Thy bill, that now with pain scant forage earns. - Julian C.H. Fane,

Julian C.H. Fane

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

John Dewey

Successful leaders have the courage to take action where others hesitate.

Harry S Anonymous

In the communities of the faithful, men had to impress upon themselves and upon others what Jesus said and did, for the more convinced they were that he was neither a Jewish pretender nor an unsubstantial deity like one of the deities of the cults, the more urgent it was for them to recall that his words were the rule of their life, and that his actions in history had created their position in the world; they had to think out their faith, to state it against outside criticism, and to teach it within their own circle, instead of being content with it as a mere emotion; they had also to refresh their courage by anticipating the future, which they believed was in the hands of their Lord. The common basis of their life was the conviction that they enjoyed a new relationship with God, for which they were indebted to Jesus. The technical term for this relationship was "covenant", and "covenant" became eventually in their vocabulary "testament". Hence the later name for these writings of the church, when gathered into a sacred collection, was "The New Testament"—New because the older relationship of God to his people, which had obtained under Judaism, with its Old Testament was superseded by the faith and fellowship which Jesus Christ his Son had inaugurated. It was the consciousness of this that inspired the early Christians to live, and to write about the origin and applications of this new life. They wrote for their own age, without a thought of posterity, and they did not write in unison but in harmony.

James Moffatt

The devil never tempts us with more success than when he tempts us with a sight of our own good actions.

Bp. Thomas Wilson

Though sympathizing with the revolutionaries' analysis of what was wrong with society and in fact being mistaken for a revolutionary himself by the political authorities of his day, nevertheless Jesus did not advocate a new political regime to be established by force through revolutionary action. He called for the love of our enemies, not their destruction; ... for readiness to suffer instead of using force; for forgiveness instead of hate and revenge. One might even say [that] Jesus was more revolutionary than the revolutionaries, or revolutionary in a very different way. The revolution he had in mind was a radical change of heart on the part of mankind, involving conversion away from selfishness and toward the willing service of God and of people in general.

Clark H. Pinnock

Feast of Agnes, Child Martyr at Rome, 304 Christians in their relationships should be the most human people you will ever see. This speaks for God in an age of inhumanity and impersonality and facelessness. When people look at us, their reaction should be, "These are human people"—human, because we know that we differ from the animal, the plant, and the machine; and that personality is native to what has always been [human]. If they cannot look upon us and say, "They are real people", nothing else is enough. (Continued tomorrow).

Francis A. Schaeffer

THE PRESENTATION OF CHRIST IN THE TEMPLE It belongs to the very nature of the gospel that the Church is built across cultural, social, and racial barriers. There are siren voices (as well as gut reactions) telling Christians that the way to success in evangelism is to follow the natural divisions, and to try to build churches along cultural, social and racial divisions. In doing so, they ignore the "success" in the New Testament in crossing these lines; more importantly, they are in fact stressing success more highly than the truth of the gospel. To buy success at the price of treating the fundamental nature of the gospel as dispensable is to follow a false gospel.

David Bronnert

Palm Sunday Commemoration of William Augustus Muhlenberg of New York, Priest, 1877 The entrance into Jerusalem [on Palm Sunday] has all the elements of the theatre of the absurd: the poor king; truth comes riding on a donkey; symbolic actions—even parading without a permit! Also, when Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem," what was involved was direct action, an open confrontation and public demonstration of the incompatibility of evil with the Kingdom of God.

David Kirk

Commemoration of Charles Williams, Spiritual Writer, 1945 Come to the Bible, not to study the history of God's divine action, but to be its object; not to learn what it has achieved throughout the centuries and still does, but simply to be the subject of its operation.

Jean-pierre De Caussade

Commemoration of John & Henry Venn, Priests, Evangelical Divines, 1813, 1873 Here [in the Gospels] is something that the layman can hold on to, quite apart from the vagaries of critical scholarship, for it is a portrait unaffected by the authenticity of any particular saying or story. Such an encounter with the historical Jesus is, of course, not the same as Christian faith in him. Even Caiaphas, Herod, and Pontius Pilate encountered him in this way. Christian faith is still a matter of decision—either this Man is God's redemptive act, or he is not. Nor is the historical Jesus the object of our faith. That object is the Risen Christ preached by the Church. But the Risen Christ is in continuity with the historical Jesus, and it is the historical Jesus which makes the Risen Christ not just an abstraction, but clothes him with flesh and blood.

Reginald Fuller

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