quotations about action
What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Ships and Havens"
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
A natural action is accomplished in the briefest manner.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life