Action Quotes
We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.James W. Fulbright, March 27, 1964
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.Benjamin Disraeli
To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.Russell L. Ackoff
Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.Ralph Waldo Emerson
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.Immanuel Kant
Vision without action is a daydream. Action with without vision is a nightmare.Japanese Prove
I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.Camille Paglia
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.Learned Hand
Successful leaders have the courage to take action where others hesitate.Author Unknown
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.Erich Fromm
I love the United States, but I see here everything is measured by success, by how much money it makes, not the satisfaction to the individual.John Fellows Akers
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.Ralph Waldo Emerson
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.Aristotle
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 1952
Man supposes that he directs his life and governs his actions, when his existence is irretrievably under the control of destiny.Johann von Goethe
The curse of me & my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.Ezra Loomis Pound
History balances the frustration of how far we have to go with the satisfaction of how far we have come. It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.Leonardo da Vinci
Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several - - From foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy.Jean de la Bruyere
Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.Socrates
Rhythm is the basis of life, not steady forward progress. The forces of creation, destruction, and preservation have a whirling, dynamic interaction.Kabbalah
When a man dwells on the objects of sense, he creates an attraction for them attraction develops into desire, and desire breeds anger.Bhagavad Gita
Concern should drive us into action and not into depression.Karen Horney
As one acts and conducts himself, so does he become. The doer of good becomes good. The doer of evil becomes evil. One becomes virtuous by virtuous action, bad by bad action.Maitri Upanishads
The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world. Through this I know the advantage of taking no action.Lao - Tzu, The Way of Lao - Tzu
Iron rusts from disue; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks
Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it a charm.Jean Paul Richte
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable thinking stops and action becomes mindless.William Fullbright
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thoughts or action we should remember our dying and try so to live, that our death brings no pleasure on the world.John Steinbeck
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory", 1996
The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.Phillips Brooks
It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.Oscar Wilde
An action will not be right unless the will be right for from thence is the action derived. Again, the will will not be right unless the disposition of the mind be right for from thence comes the will.Lucius Annaeus Seneca
What should move us to action is human dignity: the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.Dominique de Menil
Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.Amanda Cross
