Great Deed Quotes & Sayings

Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He stopped and after a while went on. 'Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices muct be made. When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt to the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, blinds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.'
How could such a man, thought Arren, be in doubt as towho and what he is? He had believed such doubts were reserved for the young, who had not done anything yet. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The task of history is to hold out for reprobation every evil word and deed, and to hold out for praise every great and noble word and deed. — Tacitus

No good act performed in the world ever dies. Science tells us that no atom of matter can ever be destroyed, that no force once started ever ends; it merely passes through a multiplicity of ever-changing phases. Every good deed done to others is a great force that starts an unending pulsation through time and eternity. We may not know it, we may never hear a word of gratitude or recognition, but it will all come back to us in some form as naturally, as perfectly, as inevitably, ... as echo answers to sound. — William George Jordan

People don't want words, as seductive, pleasant and warming as they can be. People want to see that they're worth some sacrifice or some great deed. And it's not that people are always worth it, it's that love is. — Donna Lynn Hope

Life is suffering. Until the great day of judgement, when peace and equanimity may be restored for those who are pure of heart and deed. — John Boyne

Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Men of prayer, before anything else, are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth. No other sort will fit in the scheme or do the deed. Men, great and influential in other things but small in prayer, cannot do the work Almighty God has set out for His Church to do in this, His world. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Man's highest blessedness, In wisdom chiefly stands; And in the things that touch upon the Gods, 'Tis best in word or deed To shun unholy pride; Great words of boasting bring great punishments, And so to grey-haired age Teach wisdom at the last. — Sophocles

Extirpate two thoughts within thyself: do not consider thyself worthy of anything great, and do not think that any other man is much lower than thou in worthiness. Learn humble mindedness beforehand, which the Lord commanded in word and showed forth in deed. Hence, do not expect obedience from others, but be ready for obedience thyself. — Saint Basil

A deed happens in a definite place at a definite time, but if it be sufficiently great and pregnant, its virtue radiates everywhere in time and space. — George Sarton

O, to bring back the great Homeric time, The simple manners and the deed sublime: When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate, Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight. — Mortimer Collins

May God continue to give you much more grace for every great deed. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Someone once told me that when you die every deed you ever committed, whether on behalf of good or bad is represented in the form of pebbles. Black ones for every deed done in the name of evil, white ones for every act of good. The pebbles are weighed upon a great scale, and if the white stones outweigh the black then your soul is granted peace."
He opens one bleary eye. "What's the punishment for too many black acts?"
"There is no worse punishment than standing on the threshold of heaven alone. — Ellis Adler

It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil. — L.M. Montgomery

Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever. — Wallace Stevens

Frodo did not destroy the Ring; Gollum did. This is something he would always be reminded of, especially since the very finger that bore the Ring was missing. In the end Frodo had failed. His will was not strong enough to complete the deed. However, it is doubtful if anyone else could have completed it either. The great King Isildur had failed in the same spot at the Cracks of Doom. No one else had even attempted it, nor were they willing to try; only Frodo had the courage to carry the burden to the fire. For lacking the strength to throw it in we should forgive him. — Steve Bivans

Who is your famous crush? If a super-hot Hollywood actor who also happened to be a great person wanted to take you home - and the lights stayed on during the deed - what would you do? I mean, not in theory. Honestly, what would you do?" Claire looked at me for a long moment then asked, "Would I get a heads up a few months ahead of time? So I could eat low carb and start working out?" "No." "Then, honestly, I'd run the other way. — Penny Reid

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty. — George Eliot

Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great. — Mark Lawrence

Is it true that you insisted you knew no difference in beauty between some brutal sensual stunt and any great deed, even the sacrifice of life for mankind? Is it true that you found a coincidence in beauty, a sameness of pleasure at both poles?
... You married out of a passion for torture, out of a passion for remorse, out of moral sensuality. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired. — Charles Baxter

Our own humble and meek ones, fasters and keepers of silence, will arise and go forth for a great deed. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Say not "a small event!" Why "small"? Costs it more pain that this ye call A "great event" should come to pass From that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed! — Robert Browning

Perhaps a great deed is belittled by an intention. And perhaps a small deed, by sincere intention, is made great — Abdullah Ibn Mubarak

It is the first act. The primal thrust and scream.
Which is why the newborn's immediate deed and concern
Is to cry out. To release with great violence from
Its tiny throat exploding with fire and caked blood,
A name to walk upon the earth.

It is the naming of paradisal beasts, the first duty
Of man upon rising from the dirt and God's holy spittle.

But I did not know this at first. — Ramil Digal Gulle

A real man doesn't have to run from his mother, and may even have to face the reality that no great deed is going to be great enough for him to ransom himself completely, and he may always be in his mother's debt. If he understands that ... he won't have to feel guilty, and he won't have to please her completely. He can go ahead and be nice to her and let her be part of his life. — Frank Pittman

I'll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what's a squabble in your back yard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed. — J.M. Synge

The only way to lose a kingdom is if your power drops or..well, if you're killed."
"I'm sure Volusian would love to help with that."
My minion walked near me, needing no horse to move swiftly. Upon hearing his name, he said, "I would perform the deed with great relish and much suffering on your part, mistress."
"You can't put a price on that kind of loyalty," I told Kiyo. — Richelle Mead

As if it were the task of every time to be just to everything before it! Ages and generations have never the right to be the judges of all previous ages and generations: only to the rarest men in them can that difficult mission fall. Who compels you to judge? If it is your wish - you must prove first that you are capable of justice. As judges, you must stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later. The guests that come last to the table should rightly take the last places: and will you take the first? Then do some great and mighty deed: the place may be prepared for you then, even though you do come last. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination. — Benjamin Haydon

Promising is the very air o' th' time; it opens the eyes of expectation. Performance is ever duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it. — William Shakespeare

Greatness really consists in doing some great deed with little means. — Russell Conwell

Like Princes crowned they bore them
Like Demi-Gods they wrought,
When the New World lay before them
In headlong fact and thought.
Fate and their foemen proved them
Above all meed of praise,
And Gloriana loved them,
And Shakespeare wrote them plays!
...
Now Valour, Youth, and Life's delight break forth
In flames of wondrous deed, and thought sublime
Lightly to mould new worlds or lightly loose
Words that shall shake and shape all after-time!
Giants with giants, wits with wits engage,
And England-England-England takes the breath
Of morning, body and soul, till the great Age
Fulfills in one great chord:
Elizabeth! — Rudyard Kipling

We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life? — Frank Pittman

It has been a prosy day for us," she said thoughtfully, "but to some people it has been a wonderful day. Some one has been rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today-- or a great poem written-- or a great man born. — L.M. Montgomery

For this is the Great Deed that our Lord shall do, in which Deed He shall save His word and He shall make all well that is not well. How it shall be done there is no creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, nor shall know it till it is done; — Julian Of Norwich

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty. — Leon Wieseltier

I read that they have buried his body like a dog's - without funeral rites, without tribal wail, with no solemn song or act. That is the deed of to-day. That is the best that this generation has to give to this noble historic character, this man who in his person ends the line of aboriginal sanctities older that the religion of Christian or Jew. Very well. So let it stand for the present. But there is a generation coming that shall reverse this judgement of ours. Our children shall build monuments to those whom we stoned, and the great aboriginals whom we killed will be counted by the future American as among the historic characters of the continent. — Bill Yenne

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is ... the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished. — Georg Brandes

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. - VICTOR HUGO — Eric Greitens

Cheap heroism is always easy, and even to sacrifice life is easy too; because it is only a case of hot blood and an overflow of energy, and there is such a longing for what is beautiful! No, take the deed of heroism that is labourious, obscure, without noise or flourish, slandered, in which there is a great deal of sacrifice and not one grain of glory - in which you, a splendid man, are made to look like a scoundrel before every one, though you might be the most honest man in the world - you try that sort of heroism and you'll soon give it up! While I - have been bearing the burden of that all my life. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes! Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." "My hands are of your colour; but I shame to wear a heart so white. A little water clears us of this deed: How easy it is then! Your constancy hath left you unattended. — William Shakespeare

When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. — Mary Shelley

The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. — John Ruskin

What monster have we here? A great Deed at this hour of day? A great just deed - and not for pay? Absurd - or insincere? — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Being Kind Not in some great deed of heroism; not in some great speech or act that may be pointed to with pride-but rather in the little kindnesses from day to day ... — Edgar Cayce

It is a great deed to leave nothing for tomorrow. — Baltasar Gracian

One should see the world, and see himself, as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed, the scale is tipped to the good - he and the world are saved. When he does one evil deed, the scale is tipped to the bad - he and the world are destroyed.'" "Interesting. Who said that, your grandmother?" "Maimonides. The great Jewish scholastic." "I didn't know you read Jewish philosophers." "It is said, 'You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.'" "And who said that?" "Also Maimonides. — Gregory Maguire

For a generous deed lives longer than a great battle or a king's decree of a scholar's essay, because it spreads and leaves its mark on all nature and endures through many generations. — L. Frank Baum

There are two angels that attend unseen
Each one of us, and in great books record
Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down
The good ones, after every action closes
His volume, and ascends with it to God.
The other keeps his dreadful day-book open
Till sunset, that we may repent; which doing,
The record of the action fades away,
And leaves a line of white across the page.
Now if my act be good, as I believe it,
It cannot be recalled. It is already
Sealed up in heaven, as a good deed accomplished.
The rest is yours. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love. — Basil The Great

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand. — Edward Abbey

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this
that we manufacture everything there except men. — John Ruskin

In life's small things be resolute and great To keep thy muscle trained; Know'st thou when Fate Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee, "I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?" — James Russell Lowell

This idea is a great idea, and a Christian idea could not have found fuller expression. Repentance can go no further than the astonishing heroic deed that you have contemplated, if only ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed ... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage. — D.H. Lawrence

Despite attending a nominally Christian school, I had not yet been inside a church - and I wasn't about to dare the deed now. I knew very little about the religion. It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools. — Yann Martel

In life I learned that you should not brag, until you've done it And even worse than that.. Could you do it again?? That's why I'm always humble, humbleness is a brave man's obligation, since he knows what it takes to accomplish a great deed — Renzo Gracie

Will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me becuase it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ? The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is the circuit of the great ruinous deed when the name of the seventh is that of the fifth; when the third, even greater, the warlike stranger will take Paris, nor will Provence save her. — Nostradamus

The best deed of a great man is to forgive and forget. — Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I know what you think of me, O Great Acheron. I know how much you pity me and I don't need it. Do you honestly think I could ever forget the way you looked at me the first night we met? You stood there with horror in your eyes as you tried not to show it to me. Well, you achieved your good deed. You cleaned up your little foundling and made him all pretty and healthy. But don't even think that means I have to lick your boots or kiss your ass for it. My days of subjugation are over. (Zarek) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Yet heaven bless thee, my dearest Justine, with resignation, and a confidence elevated beyond this world. Oh! how I hate its shews and mockeries! when one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge. Yet this is not consolation for you, my Justine, unless indeed that you may glory in escaping from so miserable a den. — Mary Shelley

The ancestral deed is thought and done,
And in a million Edens fall
A million Adams drowned in darkness,
For small is great and great is small,
And a blind seed all. — Edwin Muir

And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky. — Ayn Rand