Quotes by Topic: Action

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."

--Katherine Mansfield, Journals

“Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.”

--Johann Kaspar Lavater

"The longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and feel 'I believe such and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act."

--Thomas Huxley, Letter to Charles Kingsley, 1860

“The winds of Grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.”

--Sri Ramakrishna, (click here for the Savvy & Sage entry dedicated to this quote)

"The only things in which we can be said to have any property is our actions...Our actions must follow us beyond the grave: with respect to them alone we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world. Our actions must clothe us with an immortality, loathsome or glorious: these are the only title-deeds of which we cannot be disinherited: they will have their full weight in the balance of eternity, when everything else is as nothing."

--Charles Caleb Colton, The Lacon 

“Well done is better than well said.”

--Benjamin Franklin

"A life which does not go into action is a failure; and this is just as true of a prophet's, a poet's, or a scholar's life as it is true of the life of a 'man of action,' in the conventionally limited popular usage of the term."

--Arthur J. Toynbee, A Study of History

"I myself must mix with action lest I whither by despair."

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

"The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.  Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures.  They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration." 

--Ernest Newman

"An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied."

--Arnold Glasow

"Note to self: finding a cool quote and writing it in your journal is not a substitute for Getting. It. Done."

--Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

"All know the way; few actually walk it."

--Bodhidharma