Quotation.Cloud - A repository of notable quotations from across time and space

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

 - Herman Melville

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

 - Laozi / Lao-Tzu

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

 - Mahatma Gandhi

How can we learn to know ourselves? By reflection, never, but by our actions. Attempt to do your duty, and you will immediately find what is in you.

 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is not enough to know; we must apply what we know. It is not enough to will; we must also act.

 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

 - Thomas Jefferson

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

 - Mahatma Gandhi

There is no man so good, that so squares all his thoughts and actions to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten times in his life. Nay, and such a one, too, as it were great pity to make away, and very unjust to punish. And such a one there may be, as has no way offended the laws, who nevertheless would not deserve the character of a virtuous man, and that philosophy would justly condemn to be whipped; so unequal and perplexed is this relation.

 - Michel de Montaigne

The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct.

 - Blaise Pascal

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far Less competition.

 - Dwight Morrow

Character isn't inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.

 - Helen Douglas

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation . . .The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

 - Jacob Bronowski