Action Quotes

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

Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action.

Napoleon Hill

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

Russell L. Ackoff

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

Become aware of internal, subjective subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc., with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hither unconscious and uncontrollable processes.

Abraham Harold Maslow

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Immanuel Kant

Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Watch your thoughts they become words. Watch your words they become actions. Watch your actions they become habits. Watch your habits they become character. Watch your character it becomes your destiny.

Patrick Overton

Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.

Sophocles, Trachiniae

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, Have a nice day.

Peter Brodie

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Socrates

Only actions give life strength only moderation gives it a charm.

Jean Paul Richte

I never add up. I only subtract from the total dying...... It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.

Mother Theresa

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calishe

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

John Locke

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Hannah Arendt

Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk we must act big.

Theodore Roosevelt

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Ohara Publications

Violence or the threat of violence must never be permitted to influence the actions or judgments of the university community. Once it does, the community, almost by definition, ceases to be a university. It is for this reason that from time immemorial expulsion has been the primary instrument of university discipline.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.

Mother Theresa

Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures free to explore the larger experiences of life. Too many of us divide and dissipate our energies in debating actions which should be taken for granted.

Ralph W. Sockman

Though a good motive cannot sanction a bad action, a bad motive will always vitiate a good action. In common and trivial matters we may act without motives, but in momentous ones the most careful deliberation is wisdom.

W. M. L. Jay

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

Jeremy Bentham

Action is the last refuge of those who cannot dream.

Oscar Wilde

The only cure for grief is action.

George Henry Lewes

The man who is completely wise and virtuous has no need of glory, except so far as it disposes and eases his way to action by the greater trust that it procures him.

Plutarch

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.

Bob Wells

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

The beginning is the half of every action.

Greek Prove

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

John Dewey

Habits... the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction... You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - By finding that it is a means of satisfaction.

Juliene Berk

The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.

John Locke

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

George Bernard Shaw

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to the end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky, in a television interview