Short Active Quotes & Sayings

soon as voices are raised productivity is lost. Disagreeing for disagreement's sake won't get you very far. To win a heated argument, you have to keep your cool. — Dana Perino

Pro-active good governance aims beyond short-term requirement keeping in mind the long-term needs such as the use of clean technology and in preparedness and mitigating climate change fallout etc. — Narendra Modi

If I could kick the person in the tail that causes me the most problems I could not sit down for a week — Will Rogers

In short, devotion is simply a spiritual activity and liveliness by means of which Divine Love works in us, and causes us to work briskly and lovingly; and just as charity leads us to a general practice of all God's Commandments, so devotion leads us to practise them readily and diligently. And therefore we cannot call him who neglects to observe all God's Commandments either good or devout, because in order to be good, a man must be filled with love, and to be devout, he must further be very ready and apt to perform the deeds of love. And forasmuch as devotion consists in a high degree of real love, it not only makes us ready, active, and diligent in following all God's Commands, but it also excites us to be ready and loving in performing as many good works as possible, even such as are not enjoined upon us, but are only matters of counsel or inspiration. — Francis De Sales

What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is active: and in silence prepares a new creation. — Christoph Christian Sturm

The church is in the hope business. — John Ortberg

The simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind, than all the (investigations) disquisitions of philosophers and than all the exhortations of moralists. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Water and air He for the Tenor chose,
Earth made the Base, the Treble Fame arose,
To th' active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave,
To Saturn's string a touch more sore and grave.
The motions strait, and round, and swift, and slow,
And short and long, were mixt and woven so,
Did in such artful Figures smoothly fall,
As made this decent measur'd dance of all.
And this is Musick. — Abraham Cowley

Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? ... I think that now, more so than ever, people are much more willing to take the time and question what's out there. — Ryan Buell

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. — George Orwell

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it's exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that's out there - a "highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism," as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it's preferable to getting killed. Like — Sebastian Junger

In fact, even fleeting feelings of delight can lead to dramatic increases in creativity. After watching a short, humorous video - Beeman uses a clip of Robin Williams doing standup - subjects have significantly more epiphanies, at least when compared with those who were shown scary or boring videos. Because positive moods allow us to relax, we focus less on the troubling world and more on these remote associations. Another ideal moment for insights, according to Beeman and John Kounios, is the early morning, shortly after waking up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. — Jonah Lehrer

The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

I will follow it, though i know so well now the deep wounds i might find. for as long as i believe that i am walking the true road, if i am slain, then i die in the knowledge that for a brief time, at least, i was part of somethin bigger. this road has perils and i will surely die on it,but,
i am not afraid to die. — R.A. Salvatore

The cyclicality of hard alternating with easy plays out not only in the day and the week but also across training cycles and even across years. Think of Olympians who take an easy year or two in their quadrennial cycles. Check that there is variety across your training at every level, from the cooldown after a hard workout to the easier year after a particularly tough season. Active recovery, both in easy workouts and in easy days, introduces variability to training. Remember Carl Foster's finding, outlined in Chapter 4, that athletes can adapt better to a greater overall training stress when it is variable instead of monotonous. Make the easy days really easy so that the hard days can be truly hard. If you can rein in your effort on your easy days, you'll have room to push a little faster or a little longer on your hard days, yielding a much bigger fitness reward than simply muddling through with easy days that are too hard and hard days that therefore become too slow or short. — Rountree Sage

I don't see any difference between a prophet and a soldier; the only difference is prophets were jackals and survived while soldiers fought and died. — M.F. Moonzajer

Yeah, the club was dark but so's the whole country. When someone important goes missing, or the case is interesting enough, everybody has the same fetish. Whole world, really. No one admits it, but it's true. — Charlie Donlea

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don't tell it. — Joan Didion

For some years he had felt weighing on him the burden of loneliness which sometimes overwhelms old bachelors. He had been strong, active and cheerful, spending his days in sport, and his evenings in amusement. Now he was growing dull, and no longer took interest in anything. Exercise tired him, suppers and even dinners made him ill, while women bored him as much as they had once amused him. — Guy De Maupassant

All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard. — Lin Yutang

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children
Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together — Alfred North Whitehead

3. Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans; [Perhaps the word "balk" falls short of expressing the full force of the Chinese word, which implies not an attitude of defense, whereby one might be content to foil the enemy's stratagems one after another, but an active policy of counter-attack. Ho Shih puts this very clearly in his note: "When the enemy has made a plan of attack against us, we must anticipate him by delivering our own attack first."] the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces; [Isolating him from his allies. We must not forget that Sun Tzu, in speaking of hostilities, always has in mind the numerous states or principalities into which the China of his day was split up.] the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field; [When he is already at full strength.] and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities. 4. The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided. — Sun Tzu

Because I wake up late, my day is often short. I'm much more active in the evenings, during which I alternately read, write, needle-point, smoke, email, and despair over my decision last June to put my television and DVD player out on the street because I wasn't getting enough work done. — Cate Marvin

Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements. — Nelson Mandela

I am sure that hon. members will realize that I am not drawing on my imagination when I state that last fall there were children going to school in Saskatchewan with only sacking wrapped around their feet. We have gone into homes and found mothers and children lying on piles of bedding in the corner; they did not have the proper bedding equipment or the proper clothing to meet the rigours of a very cold winter. — Tommy Douglas

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. — Joan Didion

In short, by the institution of childhood I mean all those attitudes and feelings, and also customs and laws, that put a great gulf or barrier between the young and their elders, and the world of their elders; that make it difficult or impossible for young people to make contact with the larger society around them, and, even more, to play any kind of active, responsible, useful part in it; that lock the young into eighteen years or more of subserviency and dependency, and make of them, as I said before, a mixture of expensive nuisance, fragile treasure, slave, and super-pet. — John Holt

It's so much more friendly with two. — A.A. Milne

The great thing about rock and roll is that someone like me can be a star. — Elton John

As a kid I was short and only weighed 95 pounds. And though I was active in a lot of Sports and got along with most of the guys, I think I used comedy as a defense mechanism. You know making someone laugh is a much better way to solve a problem than by using your fists. — Tim Conway

Ideas come at any moment
except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.
My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done. — Chuck Palahniuk

My experience is that when undergoing severe physical labor the mind is not at all active. One thinks of the particular problem in hand or perhaps the mind just wanders not performing coherent thought. As to missing various phases of civilized life, one has no time to miss anything save food or sleep or rest. In short one becomes little more than a rational animal. — David Grann

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts, some of which are gentle and continuous; others violent and short; some baser, some nobler, and all necessary. — Francis W. Newman