Emily Dickinson Quotes

Thought is the soul of act.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.

The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.

What people CAN do is very different from what they WILL do.

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

Human beings do things for a reason, even if sometimes it's the wrong reason.

It's motive alone which gives character to the actions of men.

He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Thought precedes action, action does not always precede thought.

Motives are often more important than actions

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

There is always a gap between intention and action.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.

Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.

Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention.

Reason also is choice.

We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.