The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Blessed is he who carries within himself a god and an ideal and who obeys it - an ideal of art, of science, or gospel virtues. Therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions.
Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them.
The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don't read what they write, don't ask them what they believe, just observe what they do.
The life of the spirit is centrally and essentially a life of action. Spirituality is something done, not merely something believed, or known or experienced.
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right.
There is a time for all things; a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away; there is a time to fight, and that time has come!
Life has ... taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God.
If people are suffering, then they must look within themselves. ... Happiness is not something ready-made [Buddha] can give you. It comes from your own actions.
An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by its own fullness, not by its reception.
To create is to boggle the mind and alter the mood. Once the urge has surged, it maintains its own momentum. We may go along for the ride, but when we attempt to steer the course, the momentum dies.
If thou workest at that which is before thee ... expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life.
You have striven so hard, and so long, to compel life. Can't you now slowly change, and let life slowly drift into you ... let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you.
I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.
A guru might say that spiritual deepening involves a journey toward the unselfconscious living of life as it unfolds, rather than toward a willful determination to make it happen.
Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished.
Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
It had been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly (but very firmly!) "I trust you, do what you must," life had an uncanny way of responding to your need.
It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil-far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word "human" disappears from the race.
Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands.
As your faith is strengthened, you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.
Eventually I lost interest in trying to control my life, to make things happen in a way that I thought I wanted them to be. I began to practice surrendering to the universe and finding out what "it" wanted me to do.
It had been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly (but very firmly!), "I trust you; do what you must," life had an uncanny way of responding to your need.
Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.
I see not a step before me as I tread on another year; But I've left the Past in God's keeping, the Future His mercy shall clear; And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near.
To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together-humble dependence and manly independence: humble dependence on God, and manly reliance on self.
My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.
I come to the office each morning and stay for long hours doing what has to be done to the best of my ability. And when you've done the best you can, you can't do any better. So when I go to sleep I turn everything over to the Lord and forget it.