The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
Interpretation
Actions hold more value than intentions.
This quote highlights the importance of taking action rather than simply having good intentions. It suggests that even the smallest action can have a greater impact than grand plans that are never executed, emphasizing the need for practical steps towards achieving oneβs goals.
In practice
During a motivational speech about community service, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of volunteering.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
Its hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.
There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing, but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.
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