Human Actions Quotes - Page 4

• Every thing and every human action revolves in rhythm.

  Babatunde Olatunji

  Drumming, Action, Rhythm

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• No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

  W. H. Auden

  Playing Games, Class, Innocence

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• The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

  E. M. Forster

  Thinking, Play, Effort

  E. M. Forster (2014). “Great Novels of E. M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End”, p.482, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

  Cory Doctorow

  Thinking, Action, Utopia

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• The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

  Russell Kirk

  Art, Book, Taken

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• Only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them in imagination and then achieve effective human action.

  Jerome Ravetz

  Reality, Imagination, Action

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• Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

  Mark Twain

  Boys, Men, Order

  Mark Twain (1992). “Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn”, p.14, Wordsworth Editions

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• God sees the secret springs of human action, and knows the hearts of all living.

  Joseph Smith, Jr.

  God, Christian, Religious

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• The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Hero, Epic, Fire

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• The first step toward creating an improved future is developing the ability to envision it. VISION will ignite the fire of passion that fuels our commitment to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to achieve excellence. Only VISION allows us to transform dreams of greatness into the reality of achievement through human action. VISION has no boundaries and knows no limits. Our VISION is what we become in life.

  Tony Dungy

  Dream, Commitment, Passion

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• Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Heartbreak, Betrayal, Causes

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• Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Sight, Important

  Alexis De Tocqueville (2009). “Democracy in America: Volumes I & II”, p.1164, The Floating Press

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• It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

  Zadie Smith

  Moving, People, Paper

  "Love, actually" by Zadie Smith, www.theguardian.com. October 31, 2003.

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• All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Fate, Principles, Action

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2012). “Essays in Aesthetics”, p.13, Open Road Media

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• The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.

  John Locke

  Philosophical, Evil, Perspective

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• There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Past, Vienna, Peculiar

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• Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Action, Forget, Reason

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012). “The Idiot (Vintage Classics)”, p.484, Vintage

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• As the amount of inputs go up, as the number of people and ideas that clamor for attention continue to increase, we do what people always do: we rely on the familiar, the trusted and the personal. The incredible surplus of digital data means that human actions, generosity and sacrifice are more important than they ever were before.

  Seth Godin

  Inspirational, Mean, Sacrifice

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• Pythagoras based musical education in the first place on certain melodies and rhythm that exercised a healing, a purifying influence on the human actions and passions, restoring 'Pristine Harmony' of the souls' faculties. He applied the same means to the curing of diseases of both body and mind.

  Porphyry

  Inspiration, Mean, Healing

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• Reality: "If we can sue the gun manufacturers for human actions, does this mean we can sue the car manufacturers for being hit by a drunk driver?"
  They (in favour of gun control) must believe in the existence of a substantial number of persons who are willing and able to break serious laws such asthose prohibiting murder, assault, and robbery, yet who are not willing or able to break gun control laws. Dr.

  Gary Kleck

  Believe, Mean, Gun

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• A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

  Vaclav Havel

  Spring, Greatness, Important

  "Disturbing the Peace". Book by Vaclav Havel, 1986.

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• If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?

  Albert Einstein

  Men, Thinking, Giving

  "Science, Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium". Book published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.

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• [Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity - the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Determination, Integrity, Self

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• Free-will doctrine-what does it? It magnifies man into God. It declares God's purposes a nullity, since they cannot be carried out unless men are willing. It makes God's will a waiting servant to the will of man, and the whole covenant of grace dependent on human action. Denying election on the ground of injustice, it holds God to be a debtor to sinners.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Men, Waiting, Grace

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• All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by two emotions--fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions--only two words in the language of the soul.... Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Letting Go, Fear, Two

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