Action Vs Thought Quotes

Thought expands, but paralyzes; action animates, but narrows.

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.

Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

To act is easy; to think is hard.

I think before I act---and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.

The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks

Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.

Maybe it's because we as writers are alone so often, are so attuned to listening to the run of our own thoughts, that we find it more natural to write down the thoughts rather than the deeds of our characters. But speaking as a teacher who has spent some twenty years slogging through manuscripts where thoughts and exposition pile up as thick as the aftermath of a California mudslide, I can attest to the power of the evocative detail, gesture, or figment of speech.

There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought

When we read, we fancy we could be martyrs; when we come to act, we cannot bear a provoking word.

Thought and theory must precede all action, that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

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

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

"Ego," sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing - in which thou art unwilling to believe - is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not "ego," but doeth it.

There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.

The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

There's a lot of pressure to look good, have the gun, know what you're doing and be one of the boys. I was like, "I don't want to be one of the boys. I want to be a doctor. I want to be cerebral. I want to sit back and just use something else. I don't want to do the stunts. Let the boys do that. I'm just going to be the doctor who's about taking care of other people."

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

When being is divorced from doing, pious thoughts become an adequate substitute for washing dirty feet.