Is not God always acting thus? He comes to us by His Holy Spirit as He did to these two disciples. He speaks to us through the preaching of the Gospel, through the Word of God, through the various means of grace and the providential circumstances of life; and having thus spoken, He makes as though He would go further. If the ear be opened to His voice and the heart to His Spirit, the prayer will then go up, "Lord, abide with me." But if that voice makes no impression, then He passes on, as He has done thousands of times, leaving the heart at each time harder than before, and the ear more closed to the Spirit's call.--_F. Whitfield._
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.--_Shelley._
Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.
It is confidently expected that the period is at hand, when man, through ignorance, shall not much longer inflict unnecessary misery on man; because the mass of mankind will become enlightened, and will clearly discern that by so acting they will inevitably create misery to themselves.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, / These three alone lead life to sovereign power. / Yet not for power (power of herself / Would come uncall'd for), but to live by law, / Acting the law we live by without fear; / And, because right is right, to follow right, / Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
Man consists in truth. If he exposes truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against conviction.
Vivre n'est pas respirer; c'est agir=--Living is not breathing; it is acting.
There is a certain mien and motion of the body and all its parts, both in acting and speaking, which argues a man well within.
Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise. Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities. The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self‐fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome. Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good. They don’t allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn’t going well for them.
Who combats bravely is not therefore brave, He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave: Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise,-- His pride in reasoning, not in acting lies.
A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his cause. If we seek the liberation of the people by means of a lie, we will surely grow confused, go astray, and lose sight of our objective, and if we have any influence at all on the people we will lead them astray as well — in other words, we will be acting in the spirit of reaction and to its benefit.
You know what else the average girl who’s acting out does?” Duke asks quietly. I glance once at Laila, but it’s obvious she can’t hear us. “What?” “She starts spending all her time with a boy who’s no good for her.
_Good sense._--They are obliged to say, "You do not act in good faith; we are not asleep," etc. How I like to see this proud reason humiliated and suppliant. For this is not the language of a man whose right is disputed, and who defends it with the mailed power of his hand. He does not trifle by saying that men are not acting in good faith, but he punishes this bad faith with might.
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Zwei sind der Wege, auf welchen der Mensch zur Tugend emporstrebt, / Schliesst sich der eine dir zu, thut sich der andre dir auf, / Handelnd erreicht der Gluckliche sie, der Leidende duldend; / Wohl ihm, den sein Geschick liebend auf beiden gefuhrt=--There are two roads on which man strives to virtue; one closes against thee, the other opens to thee; the favoured man wins his way by acting, the unfortunate by endurance; happy he whom his destiny guides him lovingly on both.
Circles are prais'd, not that abound / In largeness, but th' exactly round; / So life we praise, that does excel, / Not in much time, but acting well.
It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 235.
He who is only half instructed speaks much, and is always wrong; he who knows it wholly, is content with acting, and speaks seldom or late.
By acting, we make things concrete; action breeds motivation, not the other way around.
I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor...
Grace is the proper relation of the acting person to the action.
To seize continuously the opportunity of more and more perfect adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance some inward evil with some purer influence acting from without, in a word to make our Environment at the same time that it is making us--these are the secrets of a well-ordered and successful life. Natural Law, Environment, p. 256.
~Intelligence.~--The higher feelings, when acting in harmonious combination, and directed by enlightened intellect, have a boundless scope for gratification; their least indulgence is delightful, and their highest activity is bliss.--_Combe._
Quite apart from deliberate and conscious fraud (which is a rarer thing than is often supposed), people whose mythopæic faculty is once stirred are capable of saving the thing that is not, and of acting as they should not, to an extent which is hardly imaginable by persons who are not so easily affected by the contagion of blind faith. There is no falsify so gross that honest men and, still more, virtuous women, anxious to promote a good cause, will not lend themselves to it without any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting; 'T was only that when he was off he was acting.
We are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.
He who has not been a servant cannot become a praiseworthy master; it is meet that we should plume ourselves rather on acting the part of a servant properly than that of the master, first towards the laws, and next towards our elders.
Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that Divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation, silence and speech acting together, some embodiment and revelation of the infinite, made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there.
If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes,--some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,--and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.
That which hinders us in comparing what formerly took place in the Church with what we now see, is that we are wont to regard Saint Athanasius or Saint Theresa and others as crowned with glory, and acting in regard to us as gods. Now that time has cleared our vision we see that they are so. But when this great saint was persecuted he was a man called Athanasius, and Saint Theresa was a nun. "Elias was a man like ourselves and subject to the same passions as ourselves," says Saint Peter, to disabuse Christians of that false notion that we must reject the examples of the saints as disproportioned to our state. They were saints, say we, they are not like us. What was the case then? Saint Athanasius was a man called Athanasius, accused of many crimes, condemned by such and such a council for such and such a crime. All the bishops assented to it, and at last the pope. What did they say to those who resisted his condemnation? That they were disturbing the peace, that they were creating a schism, etc.
We all complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do; we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: ‘by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.’
Public opinion is the mixed result of the intellect of the community acting upon general feeling.
Verstand ist mechanischer, Witz ist chemischer, Genie organischer Geist=--Understanding is a mechanically, wit a chemically, and genius an organically, acting spirit.
you don’t think yourself into a new way of acting, you act yourself into a new way of thinking.
Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the people to share a public power without providing them at the same time with more public space than the ballot box and with more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than on election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being citizens and of acting as citizens. [ On Revolution .]
For it is of no avail to say it is uncertain that we gain, and certain that we risk, and that the infinite distance between the certainty of that which is staked and the uncertainty of what we shall gain, equals the finite good which is certainly staked against an uncertain infinite. This is not so. Every gambler stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty, and yet he stakes a finite certainty against a finite uncertainty without acting unreasonably. It is false to say there is infinite distance between the certain stake and the uncertain gain. There is in truth an infinity between the certainty of gain and the certainty of loss. But the uncertainty of gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake, according to the proportion of chances of gain and loss, and if therefore there are as many chances on one side as on the other, the game is even. And thus the certainty of the venture is equal to the uncertainty of the winnings, so far is it from the truth that there is infinite distance between them. So that our argument is of infinite force, if we stake the finite in a game where there are equal chances of gain and loss, and the infinite is the winnings. This is demonstrable, and if men are capable of any truths, this is one.
A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by
There is no evasion of this moral responsibility of all the nations and especially of the most powerful nations for that peace and justice which, together with the security of one’s own nation, is the object of foreign policy. Too many people who eagerly draw up perfect blueprints for world organization are secretly influenced by the expectation that after the establishment of such legal institutions they will get rid of the continuous responsibility of a burdensome foreign policy. They have fallen into the same fallacy as the classical liberal economists, namely, that if a certain set of legal institutions should be introduced, then out of the individuals’ efforts to pursue their unrestricted self-interest the social harmony would automatically ensue. The result was, of course, not social harmony but the power struggle of collective interests, class struggles, and the like. If in the national order the merely legalistic concept of the state according to the liberal pattern is impossible, a complete juridification of the international order will be even less possible. On World Peace, Justice and Charity . Too many of the planners, moreover, have an optimistic though mechanistic psychology according to which man is the creature of his institutional environment, that is, he is a bundle of causal reactions to the primary acting environmental and objective institutional factors. But this psychology of determinism forgets that man is conditioned and motivated, but not causally determined, by these institutional factors. There remains a residual sphere beyond all causal determinations, where man is morally free and can become truly culpable, not innocently guilty as in the ancient tragedy. [Sophocles’ “Oedipus Trilogy”] Sometimes this over-all juridification is caused by a tacit rejection of man’s moral nature. And contradictions appear, such as this, that Hitler is wholly explained causally as the effect of causes that are sociological, institutional, and so on, and yet considered personally and morally guilty. Politics is an integral part of ethics, as is law. Arbitrary power must be controlled by positive law. But, that law may be enabled to do so, it must itself be backed by power responsible to the moral ideas, to the national common good. The strife among nations can be best settled if the universal law of morality, the principles of natural law as the unwritten constitution of the international community, are commonly accepted. For then power is put in the service of the fundamental moral ideas. And there is no evasion of the principle that the greater the power, influence, and prestige of a nation, the greater is its responsibility for peace and justice. Moreover, the less can this responsibility be shifted to any legal institution, however abstractly perfect, and the nation still hope to return securely to a splendid isolation and to the sole pursuit of its own national happiness. On the other hand, only after the powerful nations are ready to accept in mutual understanding their direct and inseparable responsibility for peace, only then will the legal institution work. But just as important is the perpetual will to establish justice, that is, to work for changes of the actual status quo when it has become an obviously unjust status, the continuation of which would endanger the peace of the world. Peace is the work of justice. Hence it will always be this moral will to justice that gives the legal institutions power. Without this moral will and concordant responsibility, the institutions will be empty hulks, a derision of the idea of law. Though peace, the tranquility of the order, is the work of justice, justice itself ought to be vivified by charity, based on the common brotherhood of men and on the common fatherhood of God. These three — charity vivifying justice, justice working peace, and peace being tranquility of the order — by permeating and inspiring the legal institutions, are the real guaranty for the peace of the world. [“World Peace”, The State in Catholic Thought , IV.xxxii.vii.]
He who fails to reflect before acting, walks with his eyes shut and advances with danger. He also falls very often, because the eye of reflection does not enable him to see whither his footsteps lead.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.
Who combats bravely is not therefore brave, / He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave; / Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise,--/ His pride in reasoning, not in acting lies.
Suspicions are nothing when a man is really true, and every one should persevere in acting honestly, for all will be made right in time.
We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.
To seize continuously the opportunity of more and more perfect adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance some inward evil with some purer influence acting from without, in a word to make our Environment at the same time that it is making us--these are the secrets of a well-ordered and successful life. Natural Law, p. 256.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
When people are skilled at adopting free traits, it can be hard to believe that they’re acting out of character. Professor Little’s students are usually incredulous when he claims to be an introvert. But Little is far from unique; many people, especially those in leadership roles, engage in a certain level of pretend-extroversion.
To sum it all up, again and again the Bible draws the clearest possible distinction between the three Persons, the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son. They are three separate personalities, having mutual relations to one another, acting upon one another, speaking of or to one another, applying the pronouns of the second and third persons to one another.
You cannot be dissatisfied, without virtually saying that God might order things better; you cannot say that he might order things better, without virtually demanding that he change his course of acting, and give other proofs of his infinite perfections. And thus you tempt him, tempt him even as did the Israelites in the wilderness.
No one knows what he is doing while he is acting rightly, but of what is wrong we are always conscious.
I think the unique thing about music and graphic art is as opposed to, say, acting and directing, that if you are good you can always create a place for yourself.
--Not so, for in acting as we do, to oblige every body, we give no reason for hating us.--True, if we only hated in self the vexation which it causes us.
Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect.
and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. And if I have to laugh,
well, I think of my sex life.
-- Glenda Jackson
I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise. -- Chauncey Depew
All of a sudden, I want to THROW OVER my promising ACTING CAREER, grow a LONG BLACK BEARD and wear a BASEBALL HAT!! ... Although I don't know WHY!!
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener
Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth. -- Stephen R. Schwambach
Are you a parent? Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to say in those awkward situations? Worry no more... Good children always obey. Quit acting so childish. Boys don't cry. If you keep making faces, someday it'll freeze that way. Why do you have to know so much? This hurts me more than it hurts you. Why? Because I'm bigger than you. Well, you've ruined everything. Now are you happy? Oh, grow up. I'm only doing this because I love you.
Are you a parent? Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to say in those awkward situations? Worry no more... You wouldn't understand. You ask too many questions. In order to be a man, you have to learn to follow orders. That's for me to know and you to find out. Don't let those bullies push you around. Go in there and stick up for yourself. You're acting too big for your britches. Well, you broke it. Now are you satisfied? Wait till your father gets home. Bored? If you're bored, I've got some chores for you. Shape up or ship out.
Crenna's Law of Political Accountability: If you are the first to know about something bad, you are going to be held responsible for acting on it, regardless of your formal duties.
A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first.
BEWARE! People acting under the influence of human nature.
Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism. Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet. The two definition immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"