“Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?”

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, pp. 82

Original: (it) L'attrazione provoca azione. L'azione stimola il pensiero. Il pensiero raggiunge l'obiettivo.
Source: prevale.net

Source: The goal: a process of ongoing improvement (1984), p. 41

I.13 Productive | Receptive, p. 33
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

30 December 1850
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: The relation of thought to action filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it: Action is but coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling actions, of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the condensation of a multitude of truths and thoughts, and that the wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more active, the deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious, intelligent and moral action.

Sometimes ascribed to Virginia Woolf, but it appeared as early as 1854 in Anna Jameson's A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, where it is ascribed to William Wordsworth.
Misattributed

From his "Autobiographische Skizze" (18 April 1955), original German version here http://philoscience.unibe.ch/documents/kursarchiv/WS99/Skizze.pdf. Translation from Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais (1982), p. 131 http://books.google.com/books?id=U2mO4nUunuwC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA131#v=onepage&q&f=false. Pais notes that when he said "during that year", he was referring to some time between October 1895 and early fall 1896.
Variant: "Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure."
Original German version: Während dieses Jahres in Aarau kam mir die Frage: Wenn man einer Lichtwelle mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit nachläuft, so würde man ein zeitunabhängiges Wellenfeld vor sich haben. So etwas scheint es aber doch nicht zu geben! Dies war das erste kindliche Gedanken-Experiment, das mit der speziellen Relativitätstheorie zu tun hat. Das Erfinden ist kein Werk des logischen Denkens, wenn auch das Endprodukt an die logische Gestalt gebunden ist. ("Autobiographische Skizze", p. 10)
1950s
Context: During that year in Aarau the question came to me: If one runs after a light wave with [a velocity equal to the] light velocity, then one would encounter a time-independent wavefield. However, something like that does not seem to exist! This was the first juvenile thought experiment which has to do with the special theory of relativity. Invention is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.