Motivational Quotes

Action

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

- Morgan, John Pierpont

Best Quotes about Action

Reactionary: A man walking backwards with his face to the future.

Bevan, Aneurin

What the mind attends to, the mind considers. What the mind constantly considers, the mind believes. What the mind believes, the mind eventually does.

I like these words -- they seem to suggest action: If you hear a kind word spoken Of some worthy soul you know, It may fill his heart with sunshine If you'd only tell him so. If a deed, however humble, helps you On your way to go, Seek the one whose hand has helped you. Seek him out and tell him so. If your heart is touched and tender Towards sinner log and low, It might help him to do better If you could only tell him so.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Proverb, Chinese

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

Rowan, Carl

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

Proverb, English

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

Havel, Vaclav

Existence was given us for action. Our worth is determined by the good deed we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel,

Magnin, Edgar F.

10.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects.

Melville, Herman

11.

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

Schwarzkopf, Norman

12.

So many fail because they don't get started -- they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin.

Stone, W. Clement

13.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

Lewis, Harvey Spencer

14.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Nin, Anais

15.

Don't be a spectator, don't let life pass you by.

Holtz, Lou

16.

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

Proverb, American

17.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

18.

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

19.

Some people forget to plant in the spring, idle away the summer hours and then expect to reap in the fall.

20.

Let your performance do the thinking.

Brown Jr., H. Jackson

21.

When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike you, do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

22.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

Proverb, Italian

23.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Turner, Ted

24.

The successful men of action are not sufficiently self-observant to know exactly on what their success depends.

Jacobs, Joseph

25.

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

Eliot, George

26.

In action be primitive; in foresight, a strategist.

Char, Rene

27.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Heine, Heinrich

28.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

I didn't think; I experimented.

Roentgen, Wilhelm

30.

Believe in boys and girls and men and women of a great tomorrow that what so ever the boy soweth the man shall reap.

31.

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

Holtz, Lou

32.

We have all the light we need, we just need to put it in practice.

Pilgrim, Peace

33.

Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly.

Schuller, Robert H.

34.

Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way.

Graffiti

35.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

Roosevelt, Theodore

36.

I think there is something, more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren't enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision.

Stone, W. Clement

37.

If you start soon enough, you won't have to run to catch up.

38.

The best way to get something done is to begin.

39.

How long will they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?

Marley, Bob

40.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

41.

As people are walking all the time, in the same spot, a path appears.

Lu Xun

42.

When all is said the greatest action is to limit and isolate one's self.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

44.

Doing is a quantum leap from imagining. Thinking about swimming isn't much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away. The defense force inside of us wants us to be cautious, to stay away from anything as intense as a new kind of action. Its job is to protect us, and it categorically avoids anything resembling danger. But it's often wrong. Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon.

Sher, Barbara

45.

Begin somewhere: you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.

Smith, Liz

46.

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

47.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.

Einstein, Albert

48.

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