Quotes About Action

DIG Deep = "get deliberate, inspired, & going" Deliberate in their thoughts and behaviors through prayer, meditation, or simply by setting intentions; Inspired to make new and different choices; Going. They take action.

When "doing" becomes divorced from "being", pious thoughts become a poor substitute for washing dirty feet.

For the Christian one dislocating, self-impoverishing hour spent with a child living in a broken-down dump is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the enfeebled good intentions, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of those Christians who are so busy cultivating their own holiness that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the slum.

We are all subject to forgetfulness of God's faithfulness in the past, laziness to act on the divine promise, and postponing until tomorrow what Jesus is asking of us today: childlike abandonment in trust.

All our actions—eating, drinking, sleeping, working—are thus potentially Christ's actions. But this potential must be actualized. Instead of a mindless drifting through the insignificant, apparently superficial and nonreligious events of the day, our passive union with Christ can be made active by creative acts of the will, intelligence and imagination.

As Emile Leger said when he left his mansion in Montreal to go live in a leper colony in Africa, "The time for talking is over.

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." —Micah 6:8

The success or failure of a given day is measured by the quality of our interest and compassion toward those around us. We define ourselves by our response to human need. The question is not how we feel about our neighbor but what we have done for him or her. We reveal our heart in the way we listen to a child, speak to the person who delivers mail, bear an injury, and share our resources with the indigent.

We cannot claim to have the mind of Christ and remain insensitive to the oppression of our brothers and sisters. We cannot stay oblivious to the world's struggle for redemption, freedom, and peace. We know that the good done to the poor—the least of our brothers and sisters (Matthew 25:40)—is done to Jesus himself. We know that we must commit ourselves to concrete action on behalf of liberation. There are things to be done.

None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

He could hear Matthews saying, 'Worry before, and you'll be prepared. Worry afterwards and you'll keep your feet on the ground. But don't worry during action; that's fatal.

there's no such thing as being apolitical. If we sit back and do nothing, leaving all the policy making to others, that is, in fact, a position of support for the status quo, which is a very political stance to take.

I watch what I'm doing to see what I believe.

The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-It on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it.

Throw some punches for what you believe in -

Ahora no es momento de pensar en lo que no tienes. Piensa en lo que puedes hacer con lo que hay

there was no such thing as past or future. There was no time that could be lost or won. The only thing that counted was action.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

Une action faite par générosité pure se retourne toujours contre son auteur.

Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.

The Christian leader cannot simply be persons who have well informed opinions about the burning issues of our time.

As long as religious people are well dressed, well fed, and well cared for, words about being in solidarity with the poor will remain pious words more likely to evoke good feelings than creative actions. As long as we are doing well what others are doing better and more efficiently, we can hardly expect to be considered the salt of the earth or the light of the world. In short, as long as we avoid displacement, we will miss the compassionate life to which our Lord calls us.