Quotes About Action

Action with and for those who suffer is the concrete expression of the compassionate life and the final criterion of being a Christian.

Act ahead of your feelings and trust that one day your feelings will match your convictions. Choose now and continue to choose this incredible truth.

Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love.

Activism comes from an unbelief that insists that God does not or cannot move and act; it wants to replace God's supposed slowness or inaction with our activity

It is folly for a man who has a dead person in his house to leave him there and go to weep over his neighbor's dead."6

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

A truly good book…teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read…What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

I heartily accept the motto, That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

A gun will give you the body, not the bird

Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!

Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.

Be not simply good; be good for something.

The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

There are thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit until we have so conducted that we feel like new men in the old.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

If ever I was sure that someone was coming to help me, I should run like hell.