Quotes About Action

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say.  I just watch what they do.               

— Andrew Carnegie

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

— Paul Valery

Be willing to make decisions.  That’s the most important quality in a good leader.  Don’t fall victim to what I call the “ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome.” You must be willing to fire.

— T. Boone Pickens

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor great scholars great men.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

— Thomas Alva Edison

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

— Pablo Picasso

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Be not simply good; be good for something.

— Henry David Thoreau

It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.

— Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

— Joseph Conrad

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

— George Bernard Shaw

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

— Thomas Henry Huxley

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

— Winston Churchill

Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

— Will Rogers

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

— William Blake

A man who has to be convinced to act before he acts is not a man of action...You must act as you breathe.

— Georges Clemenceau

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

No sooner said than done--so acts your man of worth.

— Quintus Ennius

Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.

— James 1:22

A person may cause evil to others not only by his action but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

— John Stuart Mill

We have petitioned and our petitions have been disregarded; we have entreated and our entreaties have been scorned.  We beg no more, we petition no longer, we now defy.

— William Jennings Bryan

Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.

— Charles Dudley Warner

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

— John Locke

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.

— H. L. Mencken

Don’t just do something, stand there.

— Daniel Berrigan, on the importance of thought as well as action during the 1960's war protests

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Talk without effort is nothing.

— Maria W. Stewart

Violence of language leads to violence of action.  Angry men seldom fight if their tongues do not lead the fray.

— Charles Victor Roman

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

— Frantz Fanon

Always behave like a duck--keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.

— Lord Barbizon

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

— Eldridge Cleaver