Quotes about action page 8
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist
Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time
On being told that his film Stalker should be faster and more dynamic by officials at Goskino.
Sculpting in Time (1989)
“talk was cheap and useless. Action was what mattered. And me, I was moving. Now, again, always.”
Sarah Dessen book What Happened to Goodbye
Source: What Happened to Goodbye
“Books have great value, actions have greater value.”
Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer
Source: The Well of Ascension
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Marcus Aurelius book Meditations
V.20
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V
Context: In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us--like sun, wind, and animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. (Hays translation)
Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer
Source: The Invisible Library
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
Source: The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii
“Everyone performs bad actions… A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.”
Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated
Source: Everything Is Illuminated
“Your actions is like a raindrop; it falls into the pond making ripples and then its over…”
Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever
Source: The Truth About Forever
“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto.
As quoted in Borges Verbal (1999) edited by Pilar Bravo and Mario Paoletti, p. 156
John Steinbeck book East of Eden
Source: East of Eden (1952)
Context: When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
Context: In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
Ludwig von Mises book Socialism
Part II : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § I : The Economics of an Isolated Socialist Community, Ch. 5 : The Nature of Economic Activity, p. 97 http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS3.html#Part%20II,Ch.5 <br class="br">Socialism (1922) <br class="br">Source: Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
“big plans require big action”
Greg Behrendt book He's Just Not That into You
He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
“The ancestor of every action is a thought.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Spiritual Laws
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841)
“As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist
Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker
Source: Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You
Yvon Chouinard (1938) American mountain climber
Source: Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
“Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.”
Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters
Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
“You can only control your own actions. Not other people’s reactions.”
Emily Giffin (1972) American writer
Source: Something Blue
Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer
Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.
“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”
George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss
Source: The Mill on the Floss
Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist
"The Absolute Collective", an essay first published in The Criterion on The Absolute Collective : A Philosophical Attempt to Overcome Our Broken State by Erich Gutkind, as translated by Marjorie Gabain
The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
Context: All about us we see a world in revolt; but revolt is negative, a mere finishing-off process. In the midst of destruction we carry with us also our creation, our hopes, our strength, our urge to be fulfilled. The climate changes as the wheel turns, and what is true for the sidereal world is true for man. The last two thousand years have brought about a duality in man such as he never experienced before, and yet the man who dominates this whole period was one who stood for wholeness, one who proclaimed the Holy Ghost. No life in the whole history of man has been so misinterpreted, so woefully misunderstood as Christ's. If not a single Man has shown himself capable of following the example of Christ, and doubtless none ever will for we shall no longer have need of Christs, nevertheless this one profound example has altered our climate. Unconsciously we are moving into a new realm of being; what we have brought to perfection, in our zeal to escape the true reality, is a complete arsenal of destruction; when we have rid ourselves of the suicidal mania for a beyond we shall begin the life of here and now which is reality and which is sufficient unto itself. We shall have no need for art or religion because we shall be in ourselves a work of art. This is how I interpret realistically what Gutkind has set forth philosophically; this is the way in which man will overcome his broken state. If my statements are not precisely in accord with the text of Gutkind's thesis, I nevertheless am thoroughly in accord with Gutkind and his view of things. I have felt it my duty not only to set forth his doctrine, but to launch it, and in launching it to augment it, activate it. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. I am one man who can truly say that he has understood and acted upon this profound thought of Gutkind's —“the stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
11 November 1842
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)
Source: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations - 1841-1844
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist
“… guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.”
Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone
Source: Cutting for Stone
“Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action.”
Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood
Source: Norwegian Wood
Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer
“Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.”
Idries Shah book Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Source: Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Justina Chen (1968) American writer
Source: North of Beautiful
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing
Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 94
“Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.”
John D. MacDonald book The Green Ripper
Source: The Green Ripper
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)
“An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.”
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher
Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)
Context: He [Jesus] combines all duties (1) in one universal rule (which includes within itself both the inner and the outer moral relations of men), namely: Perform your duty for no motive other than unconditioned esteem for duty itself, i. e., love God (the Legislator of all duties) above all else; and (2) in a particular rule, that, namely, which concerns man’s external relation to other men as universal duty: Love every one as yourself, i. e., further his welfare from good-will that is immediate and not derived from motives of self-advantage. These commands are not mere laws of virtue but precepts of holiness which we ought to pursue, and the very pursuit of them is called virtue. Accordingly he destroys the hope of all who intend to wait upon this moral goodness quite passively, with their hands in their laps, as though it were a heavenly gift which descends from on high. He who leaves unused the natural predisposition to goodness which lies in human nature (like a talent entrusted to him) in lazy confidence that a higher moral influence will no doubt supply the moral character and completeness which he lacks, is confronted with the threat that even the good which, by virtue of his natural predisposition, he may have done, will not be allowed to stand him in stead because of this neglect (XXV, 29).
“A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man
Prologue.
Source: Invisible Man (1952)
“our future depends on our actions as a species.”
Sakyong Mipham (1962) tibetan lama
The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity's Hidden Treasure
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution", sermon at the National Cathedral, 31 March 1968, published in A Testament of Hope (1986)
1960s
Source: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer
Source: Reinvention: How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life
Justina Chen (1968) American writer
Source: North of Beautiful
“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
Donna Tartt book The Secret History
Source: The Secret History
Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People
“There is only one way to learn … It's through action.”
Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 131.
Marion Roach (1956) American writer
Source: Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair
