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Creative quotes and quotations
On Action...

 

Dreamers may like dreaming, inventors may like inventing, but not so many of them like the effort of putting their ideas into action. In fact the action part of the cycle involves more creativity and innovation than ever, perhaps even recreating yourself as a person of action.

See also

attitude*, business, climate, challenge, change, commitment, courage, daring, effort*, experimenting, failure, management, passion, persistence*, resistance

Quotes

‘You can learn all you want about Freud, but sooner or later you have to go out with the girls.’

Wallace Andrews

‘Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.’

Aristotle

‘Few ideas are in themselves practical. It is for want of imagination in applying them that they fail. The creative process does not end with an idea–it only starts with an idea.’

John Arnold

Vision without action is merely a dream. action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world!’

Joel Barker

‘If you want to be one of the first into a new territory, you cannot wait for large amounts of evidence.’

Joel Barker

‘Our ancestors who changed the world did so through new ideas which came to them as they acted.’

Raymond Charles Barker

Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action.’

Warren Bennis

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.’

Henri Bergson

‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.’

William Blake

‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’

William Blake

‘Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.’

Napoleon Boneparte

‘Jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.’

Ray Bradbury

‘It isn’t that inspiration doesn’t exist, but it comes only with writing.’

John Braine

‘Nothing we can do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.’

Ashleigh Brilliant

‘No one gets out of the game of life alive. You either die in the bleachers, or on the field. So, you might as well play out on the field, and go for it.’

Les Brown

‘The critical ingredient is getting off your rear end and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today.’

Nolan Bushnell

‘Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes the difference.’

Nolan Bushnell

‘I never worry about action, but only about inaction.’

Winston Churchill

‘Things do not get better by being left alone.’

Winston Churchill

‘The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.’

Confucius

‘All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things.’

Steven Covey

‘I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.’

Leonardo Da Vinci

‘Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigours of the mind.’

Leonardo Da Vinci

Ideas are cheap and abundant; what is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.’

Peter F. Drucker

‘Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.’

Peter F. Drucker

‘I have more respect for the fellow with a single idea who gets there than for the fellow with a thousand ideas who does nothing.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘The legs are the wheels of creativity.’

Albert Einstein

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.’

Henry Ford

‘To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream, not only plan but also believe.’

Anatole France

‘The sleeping fox catches no poultry.’

Benjamin Franklin

Speak little, do much.’

Benjamin Franklin

‘Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright.’

Benjamin Franklin

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.’

Erich Fromm

Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough we must do.’

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘To put your ideas into action is the most difficult thing in the world.’

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world.’

Mahatma Gandhi

‘A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.’

Kahlil Gibran

‘We’re all human and we all goof. Do things that may be wrong, but do something.’

Newt Gingrich

‘Never mistake motion for action.’

Ernest Hemingway

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.’

Conrad Hilton

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.’

Herbert Hoover

‘A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.’

Grace Hopper

‘It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.’

Grace Hopper

‘Make history or be a part of it.’

Phil Knight

‘Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.’

Arthur Koestler

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

Theodore Levitt

Ideas without action are worthless.’

Harvey Mackay

‘We must have the courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act.’

Maxwell Maltz

‘I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about future, but only in the present can I act.’

Abraham Maslow

‘No matter how deep a study you make. What you really have to rely on is your own intuition and when it comes down to it, you really don't know what's going to happen until you do it.’

Konosuke Matsushita

‘A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.’

Jawaharlal Nehru

‘Everyone has dreams. But it is what you do with these dreams that is important. Dreams, once you make the decision to act on them can become reality.’

Glynis Nunn

‘Action is the foundational key to all success.’

Pablo Picasso

‘You can accomplish much if you don’t care who gets the credit.’

Ronald Reagan

‘There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.’

Theodore Roosevelt

‘When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.’

Salman Rushdie

‘As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.’

George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they cannot find them, make them.’

George Bernard Shaw

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

‘Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it.’

Margaret Thatcher

‘If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.’

Henry David Thoreau

‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.’

Henry David Thoreau

‘You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don’t let yourself indulge in vain wishes.’

Rabindranath Tagore

‘The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’

Henry David Thoreau

‘Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.’

Frank Tibolt

‘Whatever one man is capable of imagining, other men will prove themselves capable of realizing.’

Jules Verne

‘God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.’

Voltaire

‘In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.’

H. G. Wells

‘They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.’

Andy Warhol

‘The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.’

Oscar Wilde

‘To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off.’

Virginia Woolf

 

 

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