Quotes About Action

Insofar as a sacrifice is calculated, performed after careful reckoning of the prospects of its bringing about a desired end, it loses all ethical significance. Real sacrifice occurs only when we run the risk of having sacrificed in vein. Would anyone maintain that a person who plunges into the water to save someone has acted less ethically, or unethically, because both are drowned?

There is no conceivable human condition in which man may be relieved of the tension between what he has done and, on the other hand, what he must yet do or should have done.

one cannot earn love; love is not a reward, but a blessing. On the path of love a person thus receives by "grace" the things he would otherwise have to strive for or obtain through action: the realization of both his uniqueness and his individuality. For it is the nature of love that makes us see our loved one in their uniqueness and individuality.

Cela va mal dans le monde, mais cela ira encore plus mal à moins que chacun de nous ne fasse de son mieux.

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now! It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man's sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.

Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

If you're not busy living, you're dying.

Killing these assholes was the most therapeutic thing he'd ever done in his life. It was more effective than a decade of psychotherapy.

as he reached the door. Out in front of

door and said, "Let's get that thing open, and then

One of his favorite lines was that talking is overrated.

We didn't leave when Sayid Halabi was trying to wipe out half the world's population with a coronavirus

and retrieved a

them to do when they

Jack, what do you think?

Mind moves matter.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. 'That's your course, world,' one says, 'mine is this.

There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark.

But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

Thinking was going on then as now; and thinking after all, is the flesh and blood of life; action seemed to her all out of proportion, as though people came and waved flags in your face.

And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing for people who did not share it; to Mr. Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions disappear, and clutch at them vanishing.