Action Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

For number applies itself to men, angels, actions, thoughts; everything that either doth exist, or can be imagined.

All human actions are equivalent... and... all are on principle doomed to failure.

Jean-Paul Sartre

If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all.

John F. Kennedy

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We can benefit others through our actions by being warm and generous toward them, by being charitable, and by helping those in need.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

Stephen Hawking

It's true that government cannot prevent all the downsides of the technological change and global competition that are out there right now, and some of those forces are also some of the things that are helping us grow. And it's also true that some programs in the past, like welfare before it was reformed, were sometimes poorly designed, created disincentives to work. But we've also seen how government action time and again can make an enormous difference in increasing opportunity and bolstering ladders into the middle class. Investments in education, laws establishing collective bargaining, and a minimum wage — these all contributed to rising standards of living for massive numbers of Americans.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel?

Abraham Lincoln

I like to hire people that I've seen in action. I often hire people that were on the opposing side of a deal that I respect.

It is the repeated performance of just and temperate actions that produces virtue.

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

And with the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action but by remaining true to our constitutional ideals and setting an example for the rest of the world.

Passive resistance seeks to rejoin politics and religion and to test all our actions in the light of ethical principles.

Great people and champions are special gifts of God, whom He gives and preserves; they do their work, and achieve great actions, not with vain imaginations, or cold and sleepy cogitations, but by motion of God.

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As it is in the body, so it is in the mind; practice makes it what it is, and most even of those excellencies, what are looked on as natural endowments, will be found, when examined into more narrowly, to be the product of exercise, and to be raised to that pitch, only by repeated actions.

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive. To know and to will are two operations of the human mind. Discerning, judging, deliberating are acts of the human mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

We should reflect on the idea that since the beginning of time sentient beings have been mentally unstable because they have been slaves of delusion, they lack the eye of wisdom to see the path leading to nirvana and enlightenment, and they lack the necessary guidance of a spiritual teacher. Moment by moment they are indulging in negative actions, which will eventually bring about their downfall.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of the healing.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman - repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson