Quotes About Action

Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform.

To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

Let's develop theories patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them - acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

My lack of initiative was the root cause of all my troubles - of my inability to want something before having thought about it, of my inability to commit myself, of my inability to decide in the only way one can decide: by deciding, not by thinking. I'm like Buridan's donkey, dying at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action; if I didn't think, I might still die, but it wouldn't be from thirst or hunger.

Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don't feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he's never out of sorts.

Agir, eis a inteligência verdadeira. Serei o que quiser. Mas tenho que querer o que for.

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn't superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer's superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I'm proud of myself for dissenting from life.

I acquired, with regard to action, a transcendental honesty which, ever since I became aware of it, has inhibited me from having any strong links with the tangible world.

Agir, eis a inteligência verdadeira. Serei o que quiser. Mas tenho que querer o que for. O êxito está em ter êxito, e não em ter condições de êxito. Condições de palácio tem qualquer terra larga, mas onde estará o palácio se o não fizerem ali?

How I'd love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life's purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

Seeing the immanent futility of all forms of action was, from childhood on, one of my favorite means of detaching myself even from myself.

Só com um jeito do corpo Feito sem dares por isso Fazes mais mal que o demônio Em dias de grande enguiço.

The ideal would be to undertake no more action than the false action of a fountain - rising only to fall in the same place, glittering pointlessly in the sunlight and making a noise in the silence of the night that would set any dreamer dreaming of rivers, an absent smile on his lips.

Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret. Every gesture is a revolutionary act; an exile, perhaps, from the true ... of our intentions. Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed.

better to supremely not act than to act spottily, inadequately and in vain, like the superfluous, inane, vast majority of men.

13] Incluso pensar así es actuar. Sólo en el devaneo absoluto, donde nada de lo activo interviene, donde al fin hasta nuestra consciencia de nosotros mismos se atasca en el lodo —sólo así, en ese húmedo y blando no-ser, se consigue competentemente renunciar a la acción.   No querer comprender, no analizar... Verse a uno mismo como a la Naturaleza; observar sus propias impresiones como quien observa un campo —esto es la sabiduría.

Cultiv oroarea mea fa?? de acÅ£iune ca pe o plant? de ser?.M? felicit pe mine însumi pentru disidenÅ£a mea fa?? de via??.

Com duas mãos - o Ato e o Destino - Desvendamos. No mesmo gesto, ao céu Uma ergue o facho trêmulo e divino E a outra afasta o véu. Fosse a hora que haver ou a que havia A mão que ao Ocidente o véu rasgou, Foi alma a Ciência e o corpo a Ousadia Da mão que desvendou.

Life is what we do with it. Trips are travelers. What we see is not what we see, but what we are.

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it.

To act – that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace until it's built

What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art is a refuge for the sensibility that action was obliged to forget.