Quotes About Action

Faith doesn't mean that you never doubt. It only means that you never act upon your doubts.

A character is what he does, yes - but even more, a character is what he means to do.

Sometimes, what's right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne.

No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn't help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do. There was no place in that list for feel. Not that Bean didn't have feelings. He simply refused to think about them or dwell on them or let them influence his decisions, when anything important was at stake.

But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this. To see what could be, and to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. And when a life ends as mine will end, no one can persuade me that the cost was not worth what it has brought me at last.

If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly ... but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in. I follow [God], I believe [God], because I want to live in the world that [God] has shown me.

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: Tut-tut, what at botch that was? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

You don't know what would have happened if I hadn't pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.

If you wait until you know everything, you never do anything.

What kind of rescue is this, where you toss the prisoner a knife and stand and wait to see what happens?

I'm just saying things never get so bad we can't do something to make them better.

As the proverb said, "Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night." Too late for thinking now. Too early for eating.

No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn't help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do.

I spend all my time thinking things through. It's acting on my thoughts that gets tricky. Which ones should I act on, and which ones should I ignore?

In Russia you learn patience, said Ivan. In America you learn action.

It isn't what he did, Mrs. Wiggin. It's why.

There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.

No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn't help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do. There was no place in that list for "feel.

She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.

Everything we do means something.

There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally.

If there's a problem, you fix it. You don't set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it.

So plans of attack, what good are they then? We try, we do what we can, but what really counts is what you do when command breaks down.

The other boys started to complain that pushing off walls was movement, not combat. There is no combat without movement, Ender said.