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
“Thought and theory must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”
Attributed by Anna Jameson in her A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies (1854).
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William Wordsworth 306
English Romantic poet 1770–1850Related quotes
Source: "Discipleship in the New Age" (1944), p. 475
“Action without theory is reckless; theory without action is worthless.”
(speech at Center for Popular Economics, Summer Institute), 2006-07-27
“The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.”
Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 242
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
This expression is widely misattributed to Emerson in journalism, tweets, and memes on the internet. This quotation in an earlier phrasing of Jared Eliot's statement “It used to be the Saying of an old Man, That an Ounce of Experience is better than a Pound of Science.” (Essays upon Field Husbandry, 1748; quotation reprinted in "Jared Eliot, Minister, Physician, Farmer" by Rodney H. True. Agricultural History Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1928) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3739311, p199). The quote has also been misattributed to Friedrich Engels, a claim possibly originating from the 1975 book The Strange Case of Victor Grayson by Reg Groves ( link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Udk7LCxtvugJ:socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2010_05_02_archive.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
Misattributed
Volume 2, Ch. 1
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)
“All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter.”