ACT AND ACTION

Related Subjects: Behavior, Deeds, Manners

1. Action is but coarsened thought—thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious.—AMIEL, Journal

2. Count that day lost whose low descending sun
   Views from thy hand no worthy action done.—Anonymous

3. The judgment of the world has been that Pilate did not do enough. There is no vigor in expressing an opinion and then washing your hands.—HEYWOOD BROUN, Sacco and Vanzetti

4. Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal on the rock.—BYRON, The Giaour

5. Produce! Were it but the pitifulest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name.—CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus

6. The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.—CATO THE CENSOR

7. For as action follows speeches and votes in the order of time, so does it precede and rank before them in force.—DEMOSTHENES

8. Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?—EMERSON, Spiritual Law

9. I see how many firm acts have been done; how many valiant noes have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous years.—EMERSON, Character

10. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.—EMERSON, Beauty

11. The materials of action are variable but the use we make of them should be constant.—EPICTETUS, Discourses

12. Great actions speak great minds.—JOHN FLETCHER, The Prophetess

13. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.—JOHN FLETCHER, An Honest Man's Fortune

14. A man of action, forced into a state of thought, is unhappy until he can get out of it.—GALSWORTHY, Maid in Waiting

15. Great acts grow out of great occasions and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society, and tearing it up by the roots.—HAZLITT, Table Talk

16. That action is best which pro­cures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.—FRANCIS HUTCHESON, Inquiry Concerning Moral Good & Evil

17. The great end of life is not knowledge but action.—THOMAS H. HUXLEY, Technical Education

18. Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are usually the result of chance and not of design.—LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Maxims

19. Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.—LOWELL, Among My Books

20. The Commons, faithful to their system, remained in a wise and mas­terly inactivity.—SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH, Vindiciae Gallicae

21. Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.—MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations

22. Negation, eternal immobility, mean damnation. I am all for motion. I am one who marches on.—MUSSOLINI, Ludwig: Talks with Mussolini

23. Inactivity is death.—MUSSOLINI, Fascism

24. Better do it than wish it done.—Proverb

25. Actions speak louder than words.—Proverb

26. Action is the proper fruit of knowledge.—Proverb

27. I wish to preach, not the doc­trine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.THEODORE ROOSEVELT

28. One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.—SCOTT, Count Robert of Paris

29. Action is eloquence.—SHAKESPEARE, Corioianus

30. It is no act of common passage, but a strain of rareness.—SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline

31. You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.—BERNARD SHAW, Getting Married

32. The urge towards activity (ostensibly so practical, so fruitful, so mundane, and so utilitarian) can, when unduly intensified, lead to a positive frenzy in which the doer is really "beside himself"; with the result that his actions do not merely lack the much-vaunted foundation of reality, but unavoidably and automatically-culminate in the realm of the preposterous.—JACOB WASSERMANN, Stanley

33. Cannot we study the phenomenon of action dying at the root, of a puzzling loss of the true essence of personality, in the men of action who have been most renowned in history—in Alexander, in Attila, in Caesar, in Napoleon, in Cromwell? At some particular moment in their career we note that, of a sudden, for reasons that at first elude us, madness and destruction overwhelm them.—JACOB WASSERMANN, Stanley

34. Almost always in life the lots are parted, so that a man of insight is not a man of action and a man of action is not a man of insight.—STEFAN ZWEIG, The Right to Heresy