Quotes About Actions

It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another.

Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

Il mondo forma i suoi giudizi sulle nostre azioni piuttosto dai fatti che da dove stia la ragione nei casi dubbi.

There is a kind of magnetism in goodness. Bad people will indeed find out bad people, and confederate with them, in order to keep one another in countenance; but they are bound together by a rope of sand; while trust, confidence, love, sympathy, and a reciprocation of beneficent actions, twist a cord which ties good men to good men, and cannot be easily broken.

Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me.

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

The value of literature lies in these intermittent 'true impressions.' A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world, from which these 'true impressions' come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang on to so tenaciously—in the face of evil, so obstinately—is no illusion.

Fourth, although a bit more difficult to do than the previous three considerations, you should attempt to evaluate the character of the moral actor. Character is the tendency of a person to act in predictable ways over time. Virtue theorists have led the way in insisting that any ethic that does not concern itself with character and virtue is incomplete and reduces ethics to merely a preoccupation with actions, specifically moral dilemmas that people do not often face.

What's wrong with the world? It's easy to probe the ills of the nation, the Church, and the planet and come up with a grave diagnosis... But it takes all the strength we can muster to stand at Mass and honestly say, 'I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do... Sin is not out there; it's deep inside you and me... What's wrong with the world? I am, because I sin, and my sins well up from the darkness in my own heart.

That doesn't upset too many people, but the fact that accessibility restrictions don't enter into the picture has caused more than one otherwise pacifistic soul to contemplate distinctly unpacifistic actions.

I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.

Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all of Richard Nixon's actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible.

Often we judge ourselves by our intentions and everyone else by their actions. It is possible to intend one thing while communicating something totally different. Sometimes our true motives are cleverly hidden even from us.

Humankind's strongest social bonds and actions, including the capacities for cooperation and forgiveness, and for killing and allowing oneself to be killed, are born of commitment to causes and courses of action that are "ineffable"—that is, fundamentally immune to logical assessment for consistency and to empirical evaluation for costs and consequences.

The two Old Men move beyond a rigid code of ethical prescriptions, with their almost inhumane consequences, into a more compassionate situational or occasional ethics, where there are no established formulas and fewer binding directives, where the individual always assumes responsibility for his or her actions.

Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions.

After all, not doing bad things is not the same as doing good things, but that is why you and I will never become saints.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put the point sharply: "With or without [religion], you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."120

There have been people who have done things in the name of Christ they never should have done...not everything done in the name of Christ should, in point of fact, be attributed to Christianity. It's important to remember that it's not Jesus' teaching that are at fault here; it's the actions of those who, for whatever reason, greatly strayed from what he clearly taught...

Influence often isn't noticed until it blossoms later in the garden of someone else's life. Our words and actions may land close to home, or they may be carried far and wide.

Life should not be measured by time. The only thing that counts is how one uses the time one has.

The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.

Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions.

What matters most is how you live your life, not what you have to show for it.