Quotes on Action

Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn't worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn't have provoked so much opposition.

Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.

Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.

Things do not get better by being left alone.

Abstain from all sinful, unwholesome actions, perform only pious wholesome ones, purify the mind; this is the teaching of enlightened ones

Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.

The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.

Rising early and scorning laziness, remaining calm in time of strife, faultless in conduct and clever in actions. One like this will be praised.

I would rather be alone and a loud voice for action than be silent.

It's a strange thing, you have said it thousands of times I am sure...you will never know what you can do until you try. However the sad truth is, that most people never try anything until they know they can do it.

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.

Good questions work on us, we don't work on them. They are not a project to be completed but a doorway opening onto greater depth of understanding, actions that will take us into being more fully alive.

If there is no other world and there is no fruit and ripening of actions well done or ill done, then here and now in this life I shall be free from hostility, affliction, and anxiety, and I shall live happily.

History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

Those renowned generals [Alexander and Caesar] received more faithful service, and performed greater actions by means of the love their soldiers bore them, than they could possibly have done, if instead of being beloved and respected they had been hated and feared by those they commanded.

An act of heroism, of extraordinary courage, the grandeur of it, won't easily inspire us to act in imitation, but it can inspire us to emulate its author. For that, we should learn what we can of the whole experience of the subject, the hero's life, as it was before and after, and believe that trying to emulate the character it reveals is one tried way to prepare for the tests that might await us and gain hope that our courage will not be wanting in the moment.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity.

Every action has its pleasures and its price.