992 – “Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

-anonymous [See Source Notes]

990 – “Pour accomplir de grandes choses il ne suffit pas d’agir, il faut rêver; il ne suffit pas de calculer, il faut croire.”

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”

-Anatole France

925 – “The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your action will be.”

-anonymous [See Source Notes]

880 – “There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.”

–Yamamoto Tsunetomo

745 – “ना जक्का वासलो होति न जक्का होति ब्रह्मो, कम्मना वसालो होति कम्मना होति ब्राह्मो। “

“Na jaccā vasalo hoti na jaccā hoti brāhmaṇo, Kammanā vasalo hoti kammanā hoti brāhmaṇo.”

“Not by birth does one become an outcast, not by birth does one become a brahmin. By one’s action one becomes an outcast, by one’s action one becomes a brahmin.”

–Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha

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715 – “La grandeur des actions humaines se mesure à l’inspiration qui les fait naître. Heureux celui qui porte en soi un Dieu, un idéal de la beauté et qui lui obéit: idéal de l’art, idéal de la science, idéal de la patrie, idéal des vertus de l’Évangile! Ce sont là les sources vives des grandes pensées et des grandes actions. Toutes s’éclairent des reflets de l’infini.”

“The greatness of human actions is measured by the inspiration that it brings. Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal of beauty and obeys it: an ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of country, ideal virtues of the Gospel! These are the wellsprings of great thoughts and great actions. All reflections illuminate infinity.”

–Louis Pasteur

632 – “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.”

–Václav Havel

619 – “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 are coming from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

–Michael Ryan

557 -“It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

–Andrew Davies [Often misattributed to Jane Austen, see Source Notes]

“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process. In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”

–Wangari Maathai