Motivational Quotes

Action

Those who are more adapted to the active life can prepare themselves for contemplation in the practice of the active life, while those who are more adapted to the contemplative life can take upon themselves the works of the active life so as to become yet more apt for contemplation.

- Aquinas, St. Thomas

Best Quotes about Action

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.

Peale, Norman Vincent

Anything you do can get you fired; this includes doing nothing.

Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out to it.

All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full.

Bible

If you act like you know what you're doing, you can do anything you want -- except neurosurgery.

Lowenstein, John

If you want a thing done, go. If not, send. The shortest answer is doing.

Proverb, English

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

A well begun is half ended.

Plato

11.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Turner, Ted

12.

The greatest potential for control tends to exist at the point where action takes place.

Allen, Loius A.

13.

No rules for success will work if you don't.

14.

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

Proverb, American

15.

Let us be tried by our actions.

Motto

16.

Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

17.

Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.

Evans, Richard L.

18.

Action is the real measure of intelligence.

Hill, Napoleon

19.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Gide, Andre

20.

One of the best lessons children learn through video games is standing still will get them killed quicker than anything else.

Milea, Jinx

21.

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. [Matthew 7:12]

Bible

22.

One mustn't allow acting to be like stockbroker -- you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement.

Gielgud, John

23.

Some will, some don't, so what!

Proverb, American

24.

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

Gerstner, Lou

25.

Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia.

Carrel, Alexis

26.

Sometimes something worth doing is worth overdoing.

Letterman, David

27.

For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds.

Greene, Robert

28.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

Lord, Shirley

29.

To talk goodness is not good... only to do it is.

Proverb, Chinese

30.

Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought.

Bergson, Henri L.

31.

Many have too much, but none enough.

Proverb, Danish

32.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Kushner, Rabbi Harold S.

33.

One thought driven home is better than three left on base.

Liter, James

34.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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.

Gaulle, Charles De

36.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

Edison, Thomas A.

37.

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

Einstein, Albert

38.

You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

Hazlitt, William

39.

Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.

Hansen, Mark Victor

40.

People say to me, You were a roaring success. How did you do it? I go back to what my parents taught me. Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don't just stand there, make something happen.

Iacocca, Lee

41.

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.

Vivekananda, Swami

42.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Bronowski, Jacob

43.

When deeds speak, words are nothing.

Proverb, African

44.

You can't pick cherries with your back to the tree.

Morgan, John Pierpont

45.

Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen.