“No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.”

“For History ought not to depart from the truth, and the truth is all the praise that virtuous actions need.”

“Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.”

“To all this, his illustrious mind reflects the noblest ornament; he places no part of his happiness in ostentation, but refers the whole of it to conscience; and seeks the reward of a virtuous action, not in the applauses of the world, but in the action itself.”
Ornat haec magnitudo animi, quae nihil ad ostentationem, omnia ad conscientiam refert recteque facti non ex populi sermone mercedem, sed ex facto petit.

“Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions.”

“No one can love God consciously in his heart unless he has first feared Him with all his heart. Through the action of fear the soul is purified and, as it were, made malleable and so it becomes awakened to the action of love.”

“Good officers never engage in general actions unless induced by opportunity or obliged by necessity.”
Boni duces publico certamine numquam nisi ex occasione aut nimia necessitate confligunt.

“… It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.”

“Bombardment by a new device of centres essential to the British war effort. The action was long delayed, but who can deny that the moment selected for it was chosen most appropriately from the military point of view? Germany has more secret weapons than one.”

“The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, … deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.”