Quotes about Action

Where there are things to be done the end is not to survey and recognize the various things, but rather to do them.

Rash men wish for dangers beforehand but draw back when they are in them. Brave men are excited at the moment of action, but collected beforehand.

Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes; chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Two parts, then, of the Plot — Reversal of the Situation and Recognition — turn upon surprises. A third part is the Scene of Suffering. The Scene of Suffering is a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds and the like.

And, generally speaking, all things are good which men deliberately choose to do;

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Our first presupposition must be that in nature nothing acts on, or is acted on by, any other thing at random, nor may anything come from anything else, unless we mean that it does so in virtue of a concomitant attribute.

What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.

Tragedy, then, is a representation of an action that is worth serious attention, complete in itself, and of some amplitude; in language enriched by a variety of artistic devices appropriate to the several parts of the play; presented in the form of action, not narration; by means of pity and fear bringing about the purgation of such emotions.

For the Principles of the matters of moral action are the final cause of them: now to the man who has been corrupted by reason of pleasure or pain the Principle immediately becomes obscured, nor does he see that it is his duty to choose and act in each instance with a view to this final cause and by reason of it: for viciousness has a tendency to destroy the moral Principle: and so Practical Wisdom must be a state conjoined with reason, true, having human good for its object, and apt to do.