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We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics
A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided.
MICHAEL G. CIOPPA, Success Is Not a Miracle
From thinking proceeds speaking; thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous!
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to John Jay, Aug. 1, 1786
Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Jane Eyre
Action is character.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Notes for The Last Tycoon
Contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, Stranger in a Strange Land
As a man believes, so he will act.
SAM HARRIS, The End of Faith
Let us do or die.
JOHN FLETCHER, The Island Princess
If one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm -- but that's a lie.... That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, letter to Theo van Gogh, Oct. 1884
An action is the perfection and publication of thought.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature
Action is but coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious.
HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL, Journal Intime
- The native hue of resolution
- Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
- And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
- With this regard, their currents turn awry,
- And lose the name of action.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
MARY MCCARTHY, My Confession
Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless.
HANNAH ARENDT, The Human Condition
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Coriolanus
Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, "Resistance to Civil Government"
Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.
JACOB BRONOWSKI, The Ascent of Man
Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Vivian Grey
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
VACLAV HAVEL, Disturbing the Peace
The views of men can only be known, or guessed at, by their words or actions.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Patrick Henry, Jan. 15, 1799
To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
BRUCE LEE, Tao of Jeet Kune Do
When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD, "Memory"
A man's intentions should be allowed in some respects to plead for his actions.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, Dec. 1756
Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, "Notes on Hamlet"
In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Compensation," Essays
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