He is noble who feels and acts nobly. [ Heine ]
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. [ John Fletcher ]
God is a perfect poet,
Who in His person acts His own creations. [ Robert Browning ]
Immediate are the acts of God, more swift
Than time or motion. [ Milton ]
Outward acts betray the secret intention. [ Law Max ]
Who does the best his circumstance allows.
Does well, acts nobly; angels could no more. [ Edward Young ]
The laws undertake to punish only overt acts. [ Montesquieu ]
It is the life in literature that acts upon life. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]
Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts. [ Hazlitt ]
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. [ Philip J. Bailey ]
There is more money got by ill means than by good acts. [ Proverb ]
The vicious count their years; the virtuous their acts. [ Dr. Johnson ]
The material of thought re-acts upon the thought itself. [ Lowell ]
A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
The acts that we conceal are regarded with the highest esteem. [ Pascal ]
Our acts make or mar us, - we are the children of our own deeds. [ Victor Hugo ]
A sick man acts foolishly for himself who makes his doctor his heir.
The best way to keep good acts in memory, is to refresh them with new. [ Cato ]
Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and deeds alone suffice. [ Whittier ]
Acts of kindness are soon forgotten, but the memory of an offence remains. [ Proverb ]
He is beneficent who acts kindly, not for his own benefit, but for another's. [ Cicero ]
Every one is the son of his own works; (i.e. is responsible for his own acts. [ Spanish Proverb ]
Character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence and without means. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
His daily prayer, far better understood in acts than words, was simply doing good. [ Whittier ]
Interest speaks all languages, and acts all parts, even that of disinterestedness itself. [ Rochefoucauld ]
I have learned by experience that no man's character can be eventually injured but by his own acts. [ Rowland Hill ]
Every man acts truly so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties in himself. [ Sir T. Browne ]
Friendship consists properly in mutual offices, and a generous strife in alternate acts of kindness. [ South ]
A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man, and men are the particles of which it is composed. [ J. G. Holland ]
If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him. [ Buddha ]
Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice and both are acts of the will. [ Epictetus ]
The best portion of a good man's life, -- his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. [ William Wordsworth ]
Of all acts is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none. [ Carlyle ]
Every man has in himself a continent of undiscovered character. Happy is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul. [ Sir J. Stevens ]
Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Perfect life is ever in one's acts to deal with innocence, which proves itself in doing wrong to no one but itself. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best; and he whose heart beats the quickest lives the longest. [ James Martineau ]
The mind is the master over every kind of fortune: itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery. [ Seneca ]
Character is made up of small duties faithfully performed - of self-denials, of self-sacrifices, of kindly acts of love and duty. [ Anonymous ]
Man should be ever better than he seems; and shape his acts, and discipline his mind, to walk adorning earth, with hope of heaven. [ Sir Aubrey de Vere ]
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech. [ James A. Garfield ]
By a certain fate, great acts, and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same ages. [ Milton ]
The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Great acts grow out of great occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society and tearing it up by the roots. [ Hazlitt ]
That single effort by which we stop short in the down-hill path to perdition is of itself a greater exertion of virtue than a hundred acts of justice. [ Goldsmith ]
Whatever that be, which thinks, which understands, which wills, which acts, it is something celestial and divine; and, upon that account, must necessarily be eternal. [ Cicero ]
Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. [ Bovee ]
He who kindly shows the way to one who has gone astray, acts as though he had lighted another's lamp from his own, which both gives light to the other and continues to shine for himself. [ Cicero ]
Nobility of birth does not always ensure a corresponding nobility of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog, rather than a spur. [ Colton ]
The happiness of life may be greatly increased by small courtesies in which there is no parade, whose voice is too still to tease, and which manifest themselves by tender and affectionate looks, and little kind acts of attention. [ Sterne ]
It is not the nature of avarice to be satisfied with anything but money. Every passion that acts upon mankind has a peculiar mode of operation. Many of them are temporary and fluctuating; they admit of cessation and variety. But avarice is a fixed, uniform passion. [ Thomas Paine ]
Remember always in painting, as in eloquence, the greater your strength the quieter will be your manner and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim. [ Ruskin ]
Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation. [ Coleridge ]
Superstition is the fear of a spirit whose passions and acts are those of a man, who is present in some places, and not in others; who makes some places holy, and not others; who is kind to one person, and unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrificing a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. [ John Ruskin ]
Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
If thy mother be a widow, give her double honor, who now acts the part of a double parent; remember her nine month's burden, and her tenth month's travel; forget not her indulgence, when thou didst hang upon her tender breast; call to mind her prayers for thee before thou earnest into the world; and her cares for thee when thou wert come into the world; remember her secret groans, her affectionate tears, her broken slumbers, her daily fears, her nightly frights; relieve her wants, cover her imperfections, comfort her age, and the widow's husband will be the orphan's father. [ F. Quarles ]