This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Action is the greatest tonic for depression... Every action you perform is important.
Action | Depression | Important |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The merging of action and awareness is made possible by centering attention on a limited stimulus field. To insure that people will concentrate on their actions, potentially intruding stimuli must be kept out of attention. Some writers [such as Abraham Maslow] have called this process a "narrowing of consciousness" or "a giving up of the past and the future."
Action | Attention | Awareness | Consciousness | Future | Giving | Past | People | Will | Awareness |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
A political movement must keep in touch with reality and the prevailing conditions. Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables, and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.
Action | Harm | Organization | Reality | Struggle |
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other question.
Action | Consequences | God | Question | Thought | God | Thought |
Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character… I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Wars are brought about not by fateful divine action but by widespread material selfishness. Banish selfishness - individual, industrial, political, national - and you will have no more wars.
Action | Individual | Selfishness | Will |
Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.
Action | Discussion | Indispensable | Wise | Think |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Pain, it is true, transmuted, so to say, by its own fiery heat into anger, loses every appearance of depression and feebleness; the angry man makes a show of energy, as the man in a high fever does of natural heat, while, in fact, all this action of soul is but mere diseased palpitation, distention, and inflammation.
Action | Anger | Appearance | Depression | Energy | Man | Pain | Soul |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
The man who is completely wise and virtuous has no need at all of glory, except so far as it disposes and eases his way to action by the greater trust that it procures him.
I went down into my inmost self, to the deepest abyss where I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it comes - arising I know not from where - the current which I dare call my life.
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
The value of action is that we make mistakes; mistakes show us what we need to learn.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.
Action | God | Good | Heart | Insight | Intuition | Justice | Man | Perfection | Purity | Sentiment | Soul | Space | Time |
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other.
Action | Conversation | Men | Society | Soul |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action in its character, and make it either good or bad.
Action | Character | Good | Circumstance |