This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In order to change, one must first assume responsibility: one must commit oneself to some action. The word "responsibility" itself denotes that capability: "response"+"ability" - that is the ability to respond." - Irvin David Yalom
"The path of purposeful action bears a double blessing for those who walk it: in the blessing of the world is your own. Right action is the key to the re-establishment of God consciousness within your world... Let your deeds speak your message to the world. Your actions have the power to heal. This is a responsibility of great and wonderful magnitude. It is your responsibility, and it is the easiest one, for when you choose the responsibility to heal the world, you instantly allow God to heal the world through you." - Alan Cohen
"The path of purposeful action bears a double blessing for those who walk it: in the blessing of the world is your own. Right action is the key to the re-establishment of God consciousness within your world... Let your deeds speak your message to the world. Your actions have the power to heal. This is a responsibility of great and wonderful magnitude. It is your responsibility, and it is the easiest one, for when you choose the responsibility to heal the world, you instantly allow God to heal the world through you." -
"The path of purposeful action bears a double blessing for those who walk it: in the blessing of the world is your own. Right action is the key to the re-establishment of God consciousness within your world... Let your deeds speak your message to the world. Your actions have the power to heal. This is a responsibility of great and wonderful magnitude. It is your responsibility, and it is the easiest one, for when you choose the responsibility to heal the world, you instantly allow God to heal the world through you." -
"Happiness is not external; it is not a function of what one does or does not. Happiness is in the attitude that one brings to everything one does... So if we create our own happiness, what should we be aiming toward? The answer: happiness is the fulfillment of our dreams, the accomplishment of what we set out to do, living our lives as we want to live them... Happiness, then, can reside in the carrying out of the myriad everyday tasks that we all take for granted, with one very small, but significant difference. Outwardly, we may be doing what we always do, but inwardly, our entire being is immersed and engaged more fully n each and every action, a condition known as mindfulness." -
"Happiness is not external; it is not a function of what one does or does not. Happiness is in the attitude that one brings to everything one does... So if we create our own happiness, what should we be aiming toward? The answer: happiness is the fulfillment of our dreams, the accomplishment of what we set out to do, living our lives as we want to live them... Happiness, then, can reside in the carrying out of the myriad everyday tasks that we all take for granted, with one very small, but significant difference. Outwardly, we may be doing what we always do, but inwardly, our entire being is immersed and engaged more fully n each and every action, a condition known as mindfulness." - Alan Epstein
"All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly." - Albert Camus
"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady action. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation, - preserving in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree." - Alexander Graham Bell
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, and undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule which is little known and less fixed?" - Alexander Hamilton
"It is faith and not reason which impels men to action. Intelligence is content to point out the road but never drives along it." - Alexis Carrel
"No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves." - Amelia Earhart, fully Amelia Mary Earhart
"The belief that becomes a truth for me... is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"The belief that becomes truth for me -- is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"The greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action." - Anthony "Tony" Robbins
"It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joy." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"The soul in action is nothing but through transforming itself into works." - Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, born Antonin-Dalmace
"Happiness... is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action." - Aristotle NULL
"Happiness... must be some form of contemplation. But, being a man, one will also need external prosperity; for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and must have food and other attention. Still, we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things... for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we do noble acts without ruling earth and sea." - Aristotle NULL
"Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse." - Aristotle NULL
"A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit." - Aristotle NULL
"Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger or appetite." - Aristotle NULL
"If the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains. This is indicated also by the fact that punishment is inflicted by these means; for it is a kind of cure, and it is the nature of cures to be effected by contraries." - Aristotle NULL
"Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite." - Aristotle NULL
"In the arena of human life, the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action." - Aristotle NULL
"It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions." - Aristotle NULL
"A life which does not go into action is a failure." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The action of the creative individual may be described as a twofold motion of withdrawal-and-return: withdrawal for the purpose of his personal enlightenment, return for the task of enlightening his fellow men." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?" - Arthur Asher Miller
"The man who believes firmly that the Creator of the universe loves him and cares infinitely what he dose with his life - this man is automatically freed from much of the self-distrust that afflicts less certain men. Fear, guilt, hostility, anger - these are the emotions that stifle thought and impede action. By reducing or eliminating them, religious faith makes boldness possible, and boldness makes achievement possible." - Arthur Gordon
"Man must know what is his real, chief, and foremost object in life - what it is that he most wants in order to be happy…he must find out what, on the whole, his vocation really is - the part he has to play, his general relation to the world. If he maps out important work for himself on great lines, a glance at this miniature plan of his life will more than anything else stimulate, rouse, ennoble, and urge him on to action and keep him from false paths." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"The widespread modern rejection of ritual in religion is depriving people of powerful aids for spiritual development and for defense against evil... Action cannot lead beyond action, and therefore no ritual can produce Liberation... But there are many who do not specifically seek Liberation but simply greater purity, greater devotion, general spiritual betterment, or who seek Liberation as the still unseen goal of a winding path; and it is for such as these that the appropriate ritual would be a powerful armament for progress and defense." - Arthur W Osborn
"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value -- and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Justice is truth is action." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress… Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique." - Benjamin Jowett
"Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt." - Bergen Baldwin Evans
"Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt." - Bergen Baldwin Evans
"Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think." - Bergen Baldwin Evans
"We find that the essence of human society consists in a common self, a life and will, which belong to and are exercised by the society as such, or by the individuals in society as such; it makes no difference which expression we choose. The reality of this common self, in the action of the political whole, receives the name of the ‘general will’." - Bernard Bosanquet
"Knowledge is indeed better than blind practice; meditation excels knowledge; surrender of the fruits of action is more esteemed than meditation. Peace immediately follows surrender... Lust, anger, and greed, these three are the soul-destroying gates of hell" - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of god. Therefore you must perform every action sacramentally... and be free from all attachment to results." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Unreal is action without discipline, charity without sympathy, ritual without devotion." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Action should culminate in wisdom." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL