Quotations on action

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
-Thomas Carlyle
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
-Benjamin Disraeli
Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our own deeds.
-Miguel de Cervantes
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
-Giuseppe Garibaldi
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action.� You must act as you breathe.
-Georges Clemenceau
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
-John Locke
Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.
-Peter Marshall
Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.
-William Shakespeare
We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
-Theodore Roosevelt
Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
-Daniel Webster
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
-Robert F. Kennedy
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
-Alfred North Whitehead
You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.
-John N. Mitchell
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.
-Theodore Roosevelt
Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.
-Henri Bergson
Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
-Edwin Hubbel Chapin
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Positive anything is better than negative nothing.
-Elbert Hubbard
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
-Anatole France
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
-Mahatma Gandhi
The best way out is always through.
-Robert Frost
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
-Georges Clemenceau
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,-but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
-Heinrich Heine
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
-William Wordsworth
Almost everything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi
For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
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Anything that can be done, can be done backwards.
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We the unwilling, Led by the unknowing, Are doing the impossible For the ungrateful.
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