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Action Quotes and Quotations
 After all is said and done, more is said than done.  Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out. But search the land of living men, Where wilt thou find their like again. Deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone. Go and wake up your cook. He who wants a rose must respect the thorn. I want to see you shoot the way you shout. If you want something done right, get someone else to do it. Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished. Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression. Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not. The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty. The fair request ought to be followed by the deed, in silence. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity. Why, then the world's mine oyster Which I with sword will open. Through the picture, I see reality. Through the word, I understand it. He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact. If you want a thing done, go - if not, send. All glory comes from daring to begin. Action is eloquence. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds. We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action. It is much easier to do and die than it is to reason why. 'Mean to' don't pick no cotton. Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren. There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. When you appeal to force, there's one thing you must never do - lose. In action, be primitive; in foresight, a strategist. I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain. Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. Let us act on what we have, since we have not what we wish. Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say. A = r + p (or Adventure equals risk plus purpose.) For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will. I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day. Blessed is he who carries within himself a god and an ideal and who obeys it - an ideal of art, of science, or gospel virtues. Therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions. I learn by going where I have to go. He who is outside his door already has a hard part of his journey behind him. The shortest answer is doing. Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. We will either find a way, or make one. - Hannibal If you have anything to tell me of importance, for God's sake begin at the end. There are only two forces that unite men - fear and interest. Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them. Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. The only way to get positive feelings about yourself is to take positive actions. Man does not live as he thinks, he thinks as he lives. The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don't read what they write, don't ask them what they believe, just observe what they do. Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death. Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations? The prayer of the chicken hawk does not get him the chicken. The superior man is modest in his speech, but excels in his actions. There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and activity. An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. Action is the only reality, not only reality but morality, as well. Life happens at the level of events, not words. Let us work as if success depended upon ourselves alone, but with heartfelt conviction that we are doing nothing, and God everything. Right action is the key to good living. Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. If faith without works is dead, willingness without action is fantasy. Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action. The door of opportunity won't open unless you do some pushing. The life of the spirit is centrally and essentially a life of action. Spirituality is something done, not merely something believed, or known or experienced. It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck, even while waiting for it. The man who has done nothing but wait for his ship to come in has already missed the boat. God doesn't make orange juice, God makes oranges. Learn to do thy part and leave the rest to Heaven. Trust in God and do something. God helps them that helps themselves. The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right. The success of your presentation will be judged not by the knowledge you send but by what the listener receives. He will hew the line of right, let the chips fall where they may. You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go. Oh Lord, thou givest us everything, at the price of an effort. It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to. On God for all events depend; You cannot want when God's your friend. Weigh well your part and do your best; Leave to your Maker all the rest. You, yourself, must make the effort. The buddhas are only teachers. There is a time for all things; a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away; there is a time to fight, and that time has come! Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune. It is not yours to finish the task, but neither are you free to take no part in it. Life has ... taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God. That man is blest who does his best and leaves the rest; do not worry. 'Tis man's to fight, but Heaven's to give success. - Homer If people are suffering, then they must look within themselves. ... Happiness is not something ready-made [Buddha] can give you. It comes from your own actions. I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have. No way exists in the present to accurately determine the future effect of the least of our actions. In vain our labours are, whatsoe'er they be, unless God gives the Benediction. God alone can finish. In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result. God hasn't called me to be successful. He's called me to be faithful. An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by its own fullness, not by its reception. Happy people plan actions, they don't plan results. On earth we have nothing to do with success or results, but only with being true to God, and for God. Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory. The man who has done his level best, and who is conscious that he has done his best, is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure. To create is to boggle the mind and alter the mood. Once the urge has surged, it maintains its own momentum. We may go along for the ride, but when we attempt to steer the course, the momentum dies. Try first thyself, and after call in God, For to the worker God himself lends aid. If thou workest at that which is before thee ... expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this. It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important. If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile. You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder. If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life. You have striven so hard, and so long, to compel life. Can't you now slowly change, and let life slowly drift into you ... let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you. Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul. I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. A guru might say that spiritual deepening involves a journey toward the unselfconscious living of life as it unfolds, rather than toward a willful determination to make it happen. Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished. O golden Silence, bid our souls be still, and on the foolish fretting of our care lay thy soft touch of healing unaware! Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down. When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you. No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest. One by one the sands are flowing, One by one the moments fall; Some are coming, some are going; Do not strive to grasp them all. Somehow, when we no longer feel in control, we become available to deeper aliveness. Nothing fruitful ever comes when plants are forced to flower in the wrong season. The best direction is the least possible direction. Coercion. The unpardonable crime. People who make some other person part of their job are dangerous. We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them. It had been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly (but very firmly!) "I trust you, do what you must," life had an uncanny way of responding to your need. It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil-far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word "human" disappears from the race. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands. You have freedom when you're easy in your harness. The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp. Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute, and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end. As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone, So to yield with life solves the insolvable: To yield, I have learned, is to come back again. - Lao-Tzu As your faith is strengthened, you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit. - Emmanuel For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe. Eventually I lost interest in trying to control my life, to make things happen in a way that I thought I wanted them to be. I began to practice surrendering to the universe and finding out what "it" wanted me to do. It had been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly (but very firmly!), "I trust you; do what you must," life had an uncanny way of responding to your need. Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves. So often we try to alter circumstances to suit ourselves, instead of letting them alter us. Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery. The worst thing you can do is to try to cling to something that's gone, or to recreate it. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Letting people be okay without us is how we get to be okay without them. We are the wire, God is the current. Our only power is to let the current pass through us. There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way." Here am I; send me. - Bible 'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hands: he could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins without Antonio. I am like a little pencil in God's hand. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it. Life is God's novel. Let him write it. I see not a step before me as I tread on another year; But I've left the Past in God's keeping, the Future His mercy shall clear; And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near. To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together-humble dependence and manly independence: humble dependence on God, and manly reliance on self. Whate'er we leave to God, God does and blesses us. God will help you if you try, and you can if you think you can. Doing what is right isn't the problem; it's knowing what is right. Let each look to himself and see what God wants of him and attend to this, leaving all else alone. If you can't help it, don't think about it. God tests His real friends more severely than the lukewarm ones. In vain our labours are, whatsoe'er they be, unless God gives the Benediction. Much that I sought, I could not find; much that I found, I could not bind; much that I bound, I could not free; much that I freed, returned to me. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. The soul will take that love and put it where it can best be used. - Emmanuel God alone can finish. Be God or let God. With us is the Lord our God, to help us and to fight our battles. - Bible It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. - Bible Cast thy burden on the Lord, and he shall sustain thee. - Bible But I trusted in thee, O Lord; I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand. - Bible God's will is not an itinerary, but an attitude. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths. - Bible Casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you. - Bible My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me. Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings. I come to the office each morning and stay for long hours doing what has to be done to the best of my ability. And when you've done the best you can, you can't do any better. So when I go to sleep I turn everything over to the Lord and forget it. Even now I am full of hope, but the end lies in God. - Pindar Let us do or die. Did nothing in particular And did it very well. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn't be done, and he did it. Do well and right, and let the world sink. Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, - act in the living Present! Heart within and God o'erhead. Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action. He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene. Go, and do thou likewise. - Bible So much to do; so little done. Get good counsel before you begin: and when you have decided, act promptly. - Sallust He that is overcautious will accomplish little. What's done can't be undone. Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Out of the strain of the doing, Into the peace of the done. 
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