Quotes About Act

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession. I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it. It's like, "Put on some makeup, make me look good. Okay, now I'm going to roll my shoulder." Part of me still feels like, "Wow, that's weird for a man to do."

The Patriot Act has increased the flow of information within our government, and it has helped break up terror cells in the United States of America and the United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act. The Patriot Act.

I'm an actor that loves to eat on camera. I love it. Something about the act of eating means that you actually can't act as much. You have to be involved in the very real task of trying to ingest sustenance without choking and dying. Something about that process takes the heat off trying to act and often feels more natural.

People who do not see their choices do not believe they have choices. They tend to respond automatically, blindly influenced by their circumstances and conditioning. Mindfulness, by helping us notice our impulses before we act, gives us the opportunity to decide whether to act and how to act.

The act of choosing whether or not to have a child is often an act of love, and always an act of survival.

I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words each hour, each day, everyday, until the words become as much a habit as my breathing, and the action which follows becomes as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids.

The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

We need to keep our ears open to the realities of life. If we don't act on life and take action to make things happen, it will act on us and give us results we might not want.

If you don't act on life, life will act on you

One must never be perfidious to his master. In the Lun Yu it says: One should act according to the way even in times of haste. One should act according to the way even in times of danger. It says further: 'When one is serving his master, he should exert himself.'

The world is your mirror and your mind is a magnet. What you perceive in this world is largely a reflection of your own attitudes and beliefs. Life will give you what you attract with your thoughts think, act and talk negatively and your world will be negative. Think and act and talk with enthusiasm and you will attract positive results.

You cannot act in love and act in fear at the same time. You must choose between them.

If mothers are told to do this or that or the other,... they lose touch with their own ability to act.... Only too easily they feel incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards.

How absurd to take the credit of doing the good act on oneself and lay the blame for the evil act on the Lord!

Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.

Do not wait for a change of environment before you act. Cause a change of environment through action. You can act upon your present environment so as to cause yourself to be transferred to a better environment.

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever; nor will a libertarian advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

... regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any machine. ... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

Right and responsibility go hand in hand. You can't give rights to those who are not responsible. If you want to let your canary out of the cage, the first thing you would do is to kick your cat out of the house. This does not mean you don't love your cat, but he has no right to stay in the house because he can't act responsibly. It would be foolish to wait until he kills the canary and then punish him. You already know the cat can't be trusted. The problem with Muslims is that they too can't be trusted and can't act responsibly.

Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.

Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.

I always say that I love magic but I hate magicians. I like being fooled. If you wave your hands in front of my face and I think you're doing a trick, I'm easily impressed. If you pull a quarter out of my ear, I'm quite certain you're a wizard. But I don't like the way most magicians don't act like they're magical; they act like show business dicks.

The simple act of telling a woman's story from a woman's point of view is a revolutionary act: it never has been done before.

Act, and God will act.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.

It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.

We, the people, gave the marching orders to our democratically-elected officials and instructed them. We wanted out of Vietnam and we got out of Vietnam. We wanted women's right to choose and we got women's right to choose. We got the EPA, we got the Clean Air Act, Water Act, we got rights for workers in the workplace to be protected from dangers. We accomplished pretty much all of what we wanted when we had the courage of our convictions. That is the missing ingredient.

I began to think of war, even so-called "good wars" like World War II, as corrupting everybody. Violence begetting violence. The good guys beginning to act like the bad guys. And when I studied the history of wars, it seemed to me that that was the case. Athens vs. Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians presumably the democratic state. The Spartans the totalitarian state. But as the war went on, the Athenians began to act like the Spartans. They began committing atrocities and cruelties. So I saw this as a characteristic of war, even so-called "good wars."

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.

Those who act on excitement act intermittently; this is hardly the way to avoid regression. Those whose understanding comes from emotional perceptions are as confused as they are enlightened; this is not a lamp that is constantly bright.

In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment - independent will - that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.

It is good to act as if. It is even better to grow to the point where it is no longer an act.

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

We're not like a nostalgia act, or the normal classic rock act - we're a really good musical organization, ... You're going to hear some blues, some jazz, a little of everything. The guys in the band are great musicians. When we play, we're there for real. It's not about posing, strutting in tights, that kind of stuff. It's all about music, and I've always respected my audience that way.

There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward.

People talk about the Patriot Act that was passed immediately in the wake of September 11. What the Patriot Act did was break down the walls between the various agencies.

Failure does not exist. Failure is simply someone else's opinion of how a certain act should have been completed. Once you believe that no act must be performed in any specific other-directed way, then failing becomes impossible.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

No matter what you're doing, you're never 100 percent about anything. Every choice is always accompanied by a certain amount of worry or doubt. Until it reaches a certain threshold, you don't act on it; you just sort of carry it with you, and wait to see if it reaches the threshold when you should act. Otherwise, you just become one of those worrywarts, a nervous Nellie who isn't very helpful.

I do not view suicide as wicked, just terribly sad. There is only one death, but it is like a stone cast into a pond - the ripples stretch far. Such an act must leave a burden of sorrow, guilt, shame and confusion on an entire family. A natural death, such as my father suffered, is hard enough to deal with. A decision to end one's life must be still more devastating for those left behind. I cannot imagine the degree of hopelessness someone must feel to contemplate such an act.

By shrewdly linking procreation to an act likely to make you stupid with excitement, God has seen to it that Life does indeed go on. It's possible, by the way, that this is why God's name comes up so often in the middle of the act; it's a salute to the author: Hey, whoever made this up - thanks.