Quotes About Actions

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives

While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time.

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

Do good a thousand days,     But the good is still insufficient;     Do evil for one day,     And that evil is already excessive.

Feuchtwanger's more dubious actions — e.g., he threw away cables that contained information pertaining to the prisoners but addressed to him personally, without informing the other prisoners of the cables' contents. When they learned of his callousness, the inmates were out for blood, but Schoenberner protected Feuchtwanger with the condescending defense that "by his own dim lights" he was "quite innocent.

Certain actions take place outside the normal course of things so unexpectedly that they seem to paralyse ordinary capacity for feeling surprise;

There is power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life, the kind of pain that you immediately transform into positive new actions.

But the character of a man is not to be judged from the pictures which he may draw or from the antics which he may play in his solitary hours. Those who act generally with the most consummate wisdom in the affairs of the world, often meditate very silly doings before their wiser resolutions form themselves.

It may be a procession of faithful failures that enriches the soil of godly success. Faithful actions are not religious acts. They are not even necessary actions undertaken by people of faith. Faithful actions, whether they are marked by success or they end in failure, are actions that are compelled by goodness.

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

It is their character indeed that makes people who they are. But it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse.

Happiness then, is found to be something perfect and self sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

The man who does not enjoy doing noble actions is not a good man at all.

Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.

Actions which produce [virtue] are those which increase it, and also, if differently performed, destroy it.

Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.

Happiness, therefore, being found to be something final; and self-sufficient, is the end at which all actions aim.

The actions from which [virtue] was produced are also those in which it is exercised.

A sign of this is what happens (10) in our actions, for we delight in contemplating the most accurately made images of the very things that are painful for us to see, such as the forms of the most contemptible insects and of dead bodies.

Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been.

Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.

Now there is a common division of goods into three classes; one being called external, the other two those of the soul and body respectively, and those belonging to the soul we call most properly and specially good. Well, in our definition we assume that the actions and workings of the soul constitute Happiness, and these of course belong to the soul.

Of all plots and actions the epeisodic are the worst. I call a plot 'epeisodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity.