“In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.”

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” pp. 271-272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

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Ralph Waldo Emerson727

American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

“There is nothing more horrifying than stupidity in action.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

“We all know that the besetting danger of Churches is formalism; the besetting danger of State action, of corporate action, is officialism and mechanism; and we all know that it is a drawback to many modern ideals that they rest upon materialism and a soulless secularism.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech opening the Passmore Edwards Settlement (12 February 1898), quoted in 'Mr. Morley On Social Settlements', The Times (14 February 1898), p. 12.

“The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 110
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A superioridade do sonhador consiste em que sonhar é muito mais prático que viver, e em que o sonhador extrai da vida um prazer muito mais vasto e muito mais variado do que o homem de acção. Em melhores e mais directas palavras, o sonhador é que é o homem de acção.

“Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine tätige Unwissenheit.
Maxim 542, trans. Stopp
Variant translation by Saunders: Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action. (231)
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” p. 272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)