Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.
Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism pride hardness and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.
So Bush certainly wasn't the greatest and Obama has not done the job. And he's created a lot of disincentive. He's created a lot of great dissatisfaction. Regulations and regulatory is going through the roof. It's almost impossible to get anything done in the country.
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.
The great and important duty which is incumbent on Christians is to guard against all appearance of evil to watch against the first risings in the heart to evil and to have a guard upon our actions that they may not be sinful or so much as seem to be so.
However glorious an action in itself it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.
In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work a great head.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able vicariously to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat what's more with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery of party faction and division of society.
Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation we must not merely talk we must act big.
Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness - great wealth great return great satisfaction great reputation and great joy.
Greatness lies not in being strong but in the right using of strength and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind but great actions speak to all mankind.
The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.
Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.
I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.
We oppose the reactionary policies of the U.S. government but we do not oppose the American people. We want to have many good friends in the United States.
The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truth by which men are to be guided in government as well as in all social transactions.
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved despite the government's false claims.
I can't really criticize the Tea Party people because I came into the White House pretty much on the same basis that they have become popular. That is dissatisfaction with the way things are going in Washington and disillusionment and disencouragement about the government.