This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The goal of wisdom and the goal of service are the same. The ignorant one fails to see that knowledge and action are one." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"The wise see knowledge and action as one; they see truly." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"He who sees the inaction that is in action, and the action that is in inaction, is wise indeed." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"In this world, aspirants may find enlightenment by two different paths. For the contemplative is the path of knowledge: for the active is the path of selfless action. Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act. In fact, nobody can ever rest from his activity even for a moment." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"In this world, aspirants may find enlightenment by two different paths. For the contemplative is the path of knowledge; for the active is the path of selfless action." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Let not the fruit of action be your motive to action. Your business is with action alone, not with fruit of action." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"On action alone be thy interest, never on thy fruits." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"Perform all necessary acts, for action is better than inaction; none can live by sitting still and doing nought; it is by action only that a man attains immunity from action." - 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 any attachment to the results." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"The wise man, before beginning an action, looks carefully to the end." - Bhartrihari NULL
"In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious." - Blaise Pascal
"When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Use the losses and failures of the past as a reason for action, not inaction." - Charles J. Givens
"The people may be made to follow a line of action, but they cannot be made to understand it." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"In our age, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Action is stronger than subjectivity. No matter what you feel or think, you can still act." - Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
"If the world is really the medium of God’s personal action, miracle is wholly normal." - Elton Trueblood, fully David Elton Trueblood
"Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e., his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole." -
"Happiness is in action, and every power is intended for action; human happiness, therefore, can only be complete as all the powers have their full and legitimate play." - David Thomas
"Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"[During dire days under the Nazis] Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he’s called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"However brilliant an action, it should not be esteemed great unless the result of a great motive." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Action is being truly observant of your own thoughts, good or bad, looking into the true nature of whatever thoughts may arise, neither tracing the past nor inviting the future, neither allowing any clinging to experiences of joy, nor being overcome by sad situations. In so doing, you try to reach and remain in the state of great equilibrium, where all good and bad, peace and distress, are devoid of true identity." - Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
"The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience, unsullied by the reproach of remembrance of an unworthy action." - Edward Gibbon
"Action is thought tempered by illusion." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose." - Eric Hoffer
"Successful action tends to become an end in itself." - Eric Hoffer
"The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action." - Eric Hoffer
"Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance – a flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance. To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium." - Eric Hoffer
"It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate." - Eric Hoffer
"If we had no motivation to be preoccupied with our sensations, the impressions that objects made on us would pass like shadows, and leave no trace. After several years, we would be the same as we were at our first moment, without having acquired any knowledge, and without having any other faculties than feeling. But the nature of our sensations does not let us remain enslaved in this lethargy. Since they are necessarily agreeable or disagreeable, we are involved in seeking the former, avoiding the latter; and the greater the intensity of difference between pleasure and pain, the more it occasions action in our souls. Thus the privation of an object that we judge necessary for our well-being, gives us disquiet, that uneasiness we call need, and from which desires are born. These needs recur according to circumstances, often quite new ones present themselves, and it is in this way that our knowledge and faculties develop." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
"All motion or natural action takes place in time, more or less rapidly, but still in determined moments well ascertained by nature. Even those actions which appear to take effect suddenly, and in the twinkling of an eye (as we express it), are found to admit of greater or less rapidity." - Francis Bacon
"Weakness of conduct is but the consequence of weakness of conviction; for the strongest of all the springs of human action is human belief." - François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
"Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are… most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they would respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and [they] have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"There are many paths to knowledge already discovered; and no enlightened man doubts that there are many more waiting to be discovered. Indeed, all paths lead to knowledge; because even the vilest and stupidest action teaches us something about vileness and stupidity and may accidentally teach us a good deal more." - George Bernard Shaw
"Lie not, neither to thyself nor men nor God. Let mouth and heart be one - beat and speak together, and make both felt in action. It is for cowards to lie." - George Herbert
"Man is a machine. All his actions, words, thoughts, feelings, opinions and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does , thinks, feels - all this happens. To establish this fact for oneself, to be convinced of its truth, means getting ride of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. But it is one thing to understand with the mind and another thing to feel with one’s ‘whole mass’, to be really convinced that it is so and never forget it." - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
"Existence was given us for action. Our worth is determined by the good deed we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel." - George MacDonald
"The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself." - George Santayana
"Sentimental time is a genuine, if poetical, version of the march of existence, even as pictorial space is a genuine, if poetical version of its distribution... the least sentimental term in sentimental time is the term now, because it marks the junction of fancy with action... For it is evident that actual succession can contain nothing but nows, so that now in a certain way is immortal. But this immortality is only a continual reiteration, a series of moments each without self-possession and without assurance of any other moment; so that if ever the now loses its indicative practical force and becomes introspective, it becomes acutely sentimental, a perpetual hope unrealized and a perpetual dying." - George Santayana
"A dramatic centre of action and passion… utterly unlike what in modern philosophy we call consciousness. The soul causes the body to grow, to assume its ancestral shape, to develop all its ancestral instincts, to wake and to sleep by turns… and at the same time determines the responses that the living body shall make to the world." - George Santayana
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." - George Washington
"A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all." - Georges Bernanos
"The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and there are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal labors, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be "happy" or thought that mortal man could be happy." - Hannah Arendt
"Action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time." - Hannah Arendt
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom." - Hannah Arendt