I present a collection of sentences, action quotes and aphorisms on action.
Action quotes and sayings
Table of Contents
Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible. And suddenly you will be surprised to do the impossible.
(St. Francis of Assisi)
As the rays of a small candle go far, so does a good deed in an evil world.
(William Shakespeare)
Whatever you do may not make any difference, but it is very important that you do it.
(Mahatma Gandhi)
Every action in our lives, even the smallest, is responsible for the beauty or ugliness of the world.
(Augusto Daolio)
Every action in your life touches some string that vibrates forever.
(Edwin Hubbel Chapin)
What matters is not doing much, but putting a lot of love into what you do.
(Mother Teresa of Calcutta)
Life is not made by desires but by the actions of each.
(Paulo Coelho)
To start, you need to stop talking and take action.
(Walt Disney)
A thousand words do not leave an impression as profound as a single action.
(Henrik Ibsen)
Well done is better than well said.
(Benjamin Franklin)
An ounce of action is worth as much as a ton of theory.
(Friedrich Engels)
People judge you by actions, not by intentions. Maybe you have a heart of gold, but a boiled egg also has it.
(Anonymous)
Of course, words are not actions; but sometimes a good word is as good as a good deed.
(Arturo Graf)
Take time to think; but when the right moment of action arrives: stop thinking and act.
(Andrew Jackson)
What a taste there is, sir, in life if you avoid action and adventure.
(William Shakespeare)
– But I love you.
– It’s not true. You are firm, and loving is another thing: it is a verb, an action. It is not watching a film about distant countries, but really going there, in two.
(Alessandro D’Avenia)
Taking action is the best way to find out what works and what doesn’t.
(Amelia Earhart)
Act so that your every act is worthy of becoming a memory.
(Immanuel Kant)
Man was born of action, as fire tends upward and stone tends downward. Not being busy and not existing is the same for man.
(Voltaire)
When you act it is a sign that you had thought about it before: the action is like the green of certain plants that sprouts just above the earth, but try to pull and you will see that deep roots.
(Alberto Moravia)
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and putting your thoughts into practice is the most difficult thing in the world.
(Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
Who is the father of any action? What ultimately determines what we become and where we go in life? The answer is: our decisions.
(Anthony Robbins)
Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions.
(Dallin H. Oaks)
You will seldom be mistaken if you take the extreme actions to vanity, the mediocre ones to habit and the petty ones to fear.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion and desire.
(Aristotle)
99% of human actions, good or bad, are done to pay a mortgage. Maybe the world would be better if everyone was rented.
(From the movie Thank You for Smoking)
Actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
Often we would be ashamed of our most beautiful actions if people saw all the reasons that determine them.
(François de La Rochefoucauld)
Action is the antidote of despair.
(Joan Baez)
Needless to say, men are happy with the tranquility. What they desire is action, and if they don’t find it, they will create it.
(Charlotte Brontë)
The beautiful hidden actions are the most reputable.
(Blaise Pascal)
The greatest pleasure I know of is doing a good secret action and seeing it discovered by accident.
(Charles Lamb)
A single good deed, if it dies silent, kills a thousand that could follow it.
(William Shakespeare)
What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
Philosophy teaches to act, not to speak.
(Lucio Anneo Seneca)
In this generation we will repent not only for the words and deeds of bad people, but for the frightful silence of good people.
(Martin Luther King)
For evil to triumph, it is sufficient for the good to renounce action.
(Edmund Burke)
It is easy to ignore responsibility when you are only an intermediate link in a chain of actions.
(Stanley Milgram)
Action is rarer in virtue than in revenge.
(William Shakespeare)
The fact that man knows how to distinguish between good and evil demonstrates his intellectual superiority over other creatures; but the fact that he can perform evil deeds demonstrates his moral inferiority compared to all other creatures who are unable to do them.
(Mark Twain)
Even Satan is not without flaws: from time to time he sins by doing some good deed (Valeriu Butulescu)
There is nothing more terrible than ignorance in action.
(Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
The consequences of our actions take us by the hair, completely indifferent to the fact that in the meantime we have “improved”.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
The only thing you can’t escape from is the consequences of your actions.
(Isabelle Hollande)
It is far better not to act than to act unnecessarily, fragmentarily, insufficiently, as the countless unnecessary unnecessary majority of men do.
(Fernando Pessoa)
When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet. The whole secret lies in this.
(Oscar Wilde)
Love must be experienced with actions.
(Saint Teresa of Lisieux)
Most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions require willpower.
(Robert McKee)
In a man’s actions his character affects more than his intelligence.
(Giovan Battista Niccolini)
The greatest perfection of actions is ensured by the self-mastery with which they do themselves.
(Baltasar Gracián)
The truth is, you always know what is best. The difficult thing is to do it.
(Norman Schwarzkopf)
A good deed is an insolent lesson for those who do not have the strength to do it.
(action quotes by Chateaubriand)
Make sure that your actions, even if they are not those of a king, are, in their kind, worthy of a king. Be sublime in gestures, superior in thought, and in everything you do, show that you deserve to be king, even if you are not.
(action quotes by Baltasar Graciàn)
Sow a thought and you will reap an action, sow an action and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a character, sow a character and reap a destiny.
(Anonymous)
Thought without action is a vain illusion, action without thought is a vain effort.
(Gustave Le Bon)
Knowledge and action are always indispensable to each other, like the eyes and legs: without legs, the eyes cannot walk; without eyes, the legs cannot see. (Zhu Xi)
How can you know yourself? Not through contemplation, but through acting.
(Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
Serenity is when what you say, what you think, what you do, are in perfect harmony.
(action quotes by Mahatma Gandhi)
The wise man prefers to be slow to speak, but ready to act.
(Confucius)
One of the biggest discoveries a man can make, one of his biggest surprises, is finding out that he can do what he was afraid of not being able to do.
(Henry Ford)
Do something you don’t like every day: this is the golden rule to get used to doing your homework effortlessly.
(Mark Twain)
Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a man of action. (Nolan Bushnell)
The man of action is the only person who has more illusions than the dreamer.
(Oscar Wilde)
A true man of action immediately sees before him many things to do that he will never miss the job and will succeed.
(action quotes by Fëdor Dostoevskij)
God sent me to the sea and gave me ardor and action.
(Christopher Columbus)
If we really did everything we could do, we would be literally stunned.
(Thomas A. Edison)
There are actions that are worth more than those who perform them.
(Axel Oxenstierna)
Mostly men are better at doing big things than good ones.
(Montesquieu)
The world is full of honest people. They are recognized by the fact that they perform bad deeds with more clumsiness.
(action quotes by Charles Péguy)
Often men have the modesty of their actions when they do them. In contrast, months or years often have to pass before they are ashamed of their bad deeds.
(André Giroux)
What we have done for ourselves dies with us. What we have done for others lasts forever.
(Harvey B. Mackay)
Whatever you can do, or dream of doing, you have to start doing it. Boldness carries genius, magic and strength.
(Tony Buzan)
We can only do what we can; but this we must do, despite the difficulties.
(Isaiah Berlin)
Don’t confuse movement with action.
(Ernest Hemingway)
Every day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is what you become.
(Heraclitus)
Your life will never be better than the projects you do and the actions you do. You are the architect and builder of your life, your luck, your destiny.
(action quotes by Alfred A. Montapert)
“Madness” is to continuously repeat the same action and expect a different result. If so, almost all of us are crazy.
(From the movie Wall Street)
Sometimes it’s what you don’t make yourself what you are.
(Phil Brooks)
Man is nothing but the series of his actions.
(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)
A man’s life is said to be the sum of all his actions, but his actions are often the result of the hopes, dreams and desires of those who came before him.
(From the movie The Secrets of Philadelphia)
Action is the last resort of those who cannot dream.
(Oscar Wilde)