Quotes about act
page 9

“The difference between good and evil men is not found in the acts they are willing to commit—but merely in what name they are willing to commit them in.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Bands of Mourning

Men, Evil

“The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.”

John Lithgow (1945) American character actor, musician, and author

“I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Love

“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?”

Sebastian Junger (1962) American author, journalist and documentarian

Source: The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

Men, Cry

“A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Fools

“I’ve never heard that the sexual act requires any particular intelligence. From what I’ve observed, many stupid people are easily able to produce children.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Suddenly You

Children, People, Stupidity, Intelligence

“There's a boy who they call Pony! He's always acting gross and horny! He thinks he's got a lot down there, but he sure wears tiny underwear!”

Cecily von Ziegesar The It Girl

Source: The It Girl

Boy, Thinking

“A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love,
often deciphered by children”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Variant: Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.
Source: The Book Thief

Love, Children

“I act like someone in a bomb shelter trying to raise everyone’s spirits.”

Carrie Fisher book The Princess Diarist

Source: The Princess Diarist

“Pity is the feeling of well-intentioned people who are unable to act.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: Bumi Manusia

People, Feeling

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Variant: Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Waiting, Personality

“It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Queen of Everything

Guy, Cooking

“The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Dance

“Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Act well your part; there all the honour lies.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Man

Source: An Essay on Man

Parting

“I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.”

John Connolly book The Killing Kind

Source: The Killing Kind

Time, Hurt

“Each of our acts makes a statement as to our purpose.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

“Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.”

Brian Moore (1962) British rugby player, referee, commentator

Love, Life, Wise

“Faith isn't an act of intelligence, it's an act of imagination.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Faith, Imagination, Intelligence

“People who think God is on their side are capable of the most inhumane acts. (Petrov)”

Vince Flynn Consent to Kill

Source: Consent to Kill

God, People, Thinking

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong."”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

Pieces of Eight (1982)
Source: Pieces Of Eight

Love, Hate, World

“I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book The warrior's Apprentice

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

“Maybe if I act well enough, I'll come to believe it myself.”

Garth Nix book Abhorsen

Source: Abhorsen

“Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. "He who desires but acts not," wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, "Breeds pestilence.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

Source: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Personality

“The main thing to remember is that making love is at onces the silliest and the most sacred act humans can perform.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Dragon Blood

Love, Making love

“There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can…. Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.”

David Guterson book Snow Falling on Cedars

Source: Snow Falling on Cedars

Fate, Universe

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Thinking, Personality

“You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Hope, Art, Way, Guy

“Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.”

Herman Wouk book The Winds of War

Source: The Winds of War

Love, War, Fear, Peace

“You forgot the ‘my precious,’” Anna said dryly. “If you want to act like a freaking nutcase, you have to do it right.”

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

“yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Love, People, Way

“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

“You can't control everything. You can't control how someone feels about you. Or what makes them tick. You can only control how you react, how you act, how you think and feel.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Rush

Feeling, Thinking

“That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

God

“Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Let Me be a Woman

Truth, Feeling

“Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Love, Faith, Hope, Personality

“What's the point of God making us human if He doesn't want us to act like we're human?'
'To see if we can rise above our natures,'Megan said.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

God, Nature

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“If any man can convince me and bring home to me that I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Variant translation: If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance.
VI, 21
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

Truth, Home, Search, Thinking

“He knows that there's no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who's trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you're not bothered.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

World, Way

“It is by acts, and not by ideas that people live.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

C'est d'actes et non d'idées que vivent les peuples. Series I: Sérénus http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/S%C3%A9r%C3%A9nus As quoted in The Ironic Temper : Anatole France and His Time (1932) The Literary Life (1888-1892) Variant: It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

People, Idea

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”

Maxwell Maltz (1889–1975) Plastic surgeon, self-help author

Source: Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

Personality

“Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys (1995)

Animals

“There is no wrong way to perform an act of kindness.”

Catherine Ryan Hyde (1955) American writer

Source: Pay It Forward

Way

“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Bird, Fish, Learning, Sea

“It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Salon.com Letters http://www.salon.com/books/letters/2003/08/26/chuck/index.html. Response by Palahniuk to Laura Miller's review. (2003-08-26)

“And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Hope, Despair

“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“I know you guys are living out your own private Romeo and Juliet love story, but remember: Both of them die in Act V.”

Sara Shepard (1973) Author

Source: Ruthless

Love, Guy

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

Light

“Arson is a respected profession among certain subcultures in Jersey, and the good ones don't get caught. The good ones channel lightning and mysterious acts of spontaneous combustion.”

Janet Evanovich Twelve Sharp

Source: Twelve Sharp

“And I don’t want his body touching something I wear. He’ll contaminate it. (Sasha)
Oh, good grief, Sasha. Grow up. You’re four hundred years old and you’re acting like a whelp. It’s not like he has cooties or anything. (Astrid)
Yes he does! (Sasha)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.”

Anne Tyler (1941) American novelist

People

“… It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Life, God

“Some things are sacred. Until you act like they're not. Then you lose them”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

“We reap a reward merely in the act of helping others. We never know how, or if, that reward will come back to us. Helping is the reward; none other is needed nor better.”

Terry Goodkind (1948) American novelist

Help

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

Communication, Sincerity

“The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

Home, Reading, Housing, Partnership

“Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Variant: Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.
Source: Life of Pi

Love, God, Faith, Faith

“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act … Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

" Notebook N http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1838) page 36 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=25&itemID=CUL-DAR126.-&viewtype=text quoted in [Darwin's Religious Odyssey, 2002, William E., Phipps, Trinity Press International, 9781563383847, 32, http://books.google.com/books?id=0TA81BTW3dIC&pg=PA32] also quoted in On Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Selection (1996) edited by Thomas F. Glick and David Kohn, page 81 Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements Source: Notebooks

Law, Universe, Sun

“To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

(From an introductory speech at a session of the Académie Française, December 24, 1896)”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Source: Works of Anatole France

Dreams

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

LOVE (1972)
Variant: Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest accomplishment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Life, Smile, Wise, Relationship

“Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.”

Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) Roman Catholic saint

Maxim 52, p. 259
Maxims for Her Nuns (1963)
Source: Complete Works St. Teresa Of Avila, Volume III

Love, Soul

“I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers…”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Singing, Help

“To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.”

Mark Helprin A Soldier of the Great War

Source: A Soldier of the Great War

Life, Death, World, Beauty

“Love is the only rational act.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Love

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So in a series of acts of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over.”

James Boswell book The Life of Samuel Johnson

(19 September 1777)
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)
Variant: We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

Friendship, Heart

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau

History, Hurt

“He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending, wearing masks and losing themselves in the process.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

Travis Parker, Chapter 4, p. 51
Source: 2000s, The Choice (2007)

People

“Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.”

Orson Scott Card book Children of the Mind

Source: Children of the Mind

Knowledge

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Source: Rabbit, Run

“Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, "It's my own business.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

People, Business

“The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Life, Truth, Game

“The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Change, Madness

“Sometimes it's easy to lose faith in people. And sometimes one act of kindness is all it takes to give you hope again.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

Source: Does My Head Look Big In This?

People, Faith, Hope

“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Beauty, Way

“The Suicide, as she is falling,
Illuminated by the moon,
Regrets her act, and finds appalling
The thought she will be dead so soon.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator

Suicide, Dead

“That's right. Act likerejected. It's not like you tried to kill me or anything.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

Happiness, Pleasure, Imagination, Memory

“But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Personality

“Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Love

“It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Selfishness

“There are ways in which we’re so alike. We’re reckless. We don’t think before we act. We’ll do anything for people we love. And I never thought how scary that was for the people who loved me until I saw”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Love, People, Way, Thinking

“Trust is not a passive state of mind. It is a vigorous act of the soul by which we choose to lay hold on the promises of God and cling to them despite the adversity that at times seeks to overwhelms us.”

Jerry Bridges (1929–2016) American writer

Source: Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts

God, Soul, Time

“Are you a peice of Saran Wrap?
No
Well then why are you acting so clingy?”

Lisi Harrison (1970) Canadian writer

Source: The Clique Ah-mazing Collector's Gift Set

“That's what real love amounts to- letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending- performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

Love, People, Personality

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 167

Hostility, Travel, Communication, Sense

“Love can only be found through the act of loving.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Love

“You're not asking me to guess the mind of Matrim Cauthon, are you?" Elayne asked. "I'm convinced that Mat only acts simple so that people will let him get away with more.”

Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time

Source: A Memory of Light

People

“It is not an act of bravery to try to save your own village. It is an instinct to protect what you possess. Bravery is when you step in to help when you have nothing to lose.”

Gail Tsukiyama The Samurai's Garden

Source: The Samurai's Garden

Help

“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Life, Women, Men, Understanding

“There are no random acts… We are all connected… You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind…”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Variant: That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate on life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Context: "All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

Life

“It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.”

Jodi Picoult Change of Heart

Source: Change of Heart

People, World, Religion