Quotes About Action

pulled on a pair of gloves, just

I think Philip could spend an afternoon throwing puppies from the top of the Empire State and only stop when his arm got tired." "It's not the same as killing

The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.

integrity—in their specific sense of harmony between belief and action—may lack value when the underlying belief is badly wrong. And one way to determine when the belief is badly wrong is its tendency to cause harm to others.

A complacent satisfaction in God may cause you to accidentally outwork all your religious friends.

Captain Carpenter rose up in his primePut on his pistols and went riding out.

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

Most movies, once the action starts there's no more characters. You say a couple of dumb lines and then there's just explosions until the end.

It is one thing to stand on the comfortable ground of placid inaction and put forth words of cynical wisdom, and another to plunge into the work itself and through strenuous experience earn the right to express strong conclusions.

The causes of evil karma are greed, anger, and ignorance—the three poisons. We create karma through action, by what we do with our body, words, and thoughts. In atoning we take full and unequivocal responsibility for it all. When we do that, we empower ourself. It becomes our evil karma, not someone else's. We acknowledge ourself as an active agent, not a passive victim. We begin to recognize that our life is not just something that happens to us.

When we realize the ground of being, we take responsibility directly, because what we realize is that what we do and what happens to us are the same thing.

Im James Bond. Im Jason Bourne. Im Super-freaking-Mario come to life.

Soldiers defending a country at war are not subject to the rules of procedure designed for court trials. For example, if a soldier encounters an enemy, under internationally agreed upon rules of war, that soldier can take whatever action is necessary to protect himself and neutralize his enemy, whether it involves capturing and detaining the enemy or killing him on the spot.

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.

We naturally associate democracy… with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.

When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intelligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence.

A genuine purpose always starts with an impulse. Obstruction of the immediate execution of an impulse converts it into a desire. Nevertheless neither impulse nor desire is itself a purpose. A purpose is an end-view. That is, it involves foresight of the consequences which will result from acting upon impulse.

We must stop even thinking of standing up straight. To think of it is fatal, for it commits us to the operation of an established habit of standing wrong. We must find an act within our power which is disconnected from any thought about standing. We must start to do another thing which on one side inhibits our falling into the customary bad position and on the other side is the beginning of a series of acts which may lead into the correct posture.[2] The hard-drinker

We cannot expect to gain true knowledge without acting upon our ideas.

Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature. The intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition. Thus it varies the arts in ways without end. But its intervention also leads in time to the idea of art as a conscious idea—the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.

Only in this connection of knowledge and social action can education generate the understanding... necessary for the continued existence of democracy.