Motivational Quotes

Action

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

Best Quotes about Action

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

The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.

Hill, Napoleon

All the reputedly powerful reactionaries are merely paper tigers. The reason is that they are divorced from the people. Look! Was not Hitler a paper tiger? Was Hitler not overthrown? U.S. imperialism has not yet been overthrown and it has the atomic bomb. I believe it also will be overthrown. It, too, is a paper tiger.

Zedong, Mao

So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.

Iacocca, Lee

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.

Dyer, Wayne

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

It's better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Courteline, Georges

An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

Proverb, Mexican

All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.

Einstein, Albert

10.

It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.

Proverb, French

11.

The few who do are the envy of the many who only watch.

Rohn, Jim

12.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

Aristotle

13.

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.

Arendt, Hannah

14.

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Hoffer, Eric

15.

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

Schwarzkopf, Norman

16.

Let your actions always speak for you, but be forever on guard against the terrible traps of false pride and conceit that can halt your progress. The next time you are tempted to boast, just place your fist in a full pail of water, and when you remove it, the hole remaining will give you a correct measure of your importance.

Mandino, Og

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

That spot of earth has special charms for me, in which a limited income produces happiness, and moderate wealth abundance.

Martial, Marcus Valerius

19.

The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.

Traherne, Thomas

20.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

Gorski, Nick

21.

He is rich that is satisfied.

Fuller, Thomas

22.

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

23.

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Woolf, Virginia

24.

Suit the action to the world, the world to the action, with this special observance, that you overstep not the modesty of nature.

Shakespeare, William

25.

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

Eliot, George

26.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do.

Carnegie, Andrew

27.

Take action in order to move toward your goals.

Brown, Les

28.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

Cicero, Marcus T.

29.

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

30.

Let your hook always be cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish.

Ovid

31.

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.

32.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

You don't have to get it right the first time.

Sher, Barbara

34.

Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.

Milne, A. A.

35.

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

36.

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.

Richards, Mary Caroline

38.

Have a bias toward action -- let's see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.

Thalheimer, Richard

39.

Doing leads more surely to talking than talking to doing.

Vinet

40.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Keep your head and your heart going in the right direction and you will not have to worry about your feet.

42.

It isn't sufficient just to want -- you've got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want.

Rosen, Richard D.

43.

Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.

Marden, Orison Swett

44.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

It is following the line of least resistance that makes men and rivers crooked.

46.

Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.

Collingwood, Robin G.

47.

Our actions are like the terminations of verses, which we rhyme as we please.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

48.

Many are called but few get up.

Herford, Oliver

49.

Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old -- old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we have to DO something.

Teekens, Inga

50.

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action.. You must act as you breathe.

Clemenceau, Georges