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The bridge of life is built on the scaffold of action, but rests finally on the piers of results.
Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
- How shall not man, whose nature stands
- Bound up with forces vast,
- Innate with strength, reveal his life
- In mould of holiest cast.
- His law is action: gates of power
- Stand open in his view;
- A restless soul, a holy zeal,
- Shall give him entrance through.
D. WILLIAMS, "Action," The National Magazine, Dec. 1854
- A natural action is accomplished in the briefest manner.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
It is quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.
ARTHUR HELPS, Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison, they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken from us by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave; with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world. Our actions must clothe us with an immortality, loathsome or glorious; these are the only title-deeds of which we cannot be disinherited; they will have their full weight in the balance of eternity, when every thing else is as nothing; and their value will be confirmed and established by those two sure and sateless destroyers of all other things--Time and Death.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
- Potential is the good of life
- Action the secret key.
D. WILLIAMS, "Action," The National Magazine, Dec. 1854
- Rest not! Life is sweeping by;
- Go and dare before you die.
- Something mighty and sublime
- Leave behind to conquer time!
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, "Haste Not--Rest Not"
- Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
- And what we have been makes us what we are.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
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