Action and Thought Quotes

Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.

Action without thought is empty. Thought without action is blind.

Some Christians need encouragement to think before they act. Others need encouragement to act after they think.

The lance has never blunted the pen, nor the pen the lance.

What you do makes you better at what you think. What you think makes you more effective at what you do.

The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipin g mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action.

One who loves must learn fear. One who fears must learn love. The thinker must do. The doer must think. The pacifist must fight, the fighter must find peace. If you flow as a river, burn as a fire. If you burn as a furnace, flow as a river. If you fly as a bird, sit firm as a rock. If you sit firmly, then fly as a bird. Be a fire that flows. A rock that flies. Love with fear and fear with love. For we are not fire, not water, not air, not rocks, not thoughts, not deeds, not fear, not love. We are G-dly beings.

The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.

And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking--and these are the sum of all wisdom. . . . Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out.

They that do the world's work must do its thinking.

It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies... which isolate mind and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.