Action Over Thought Quotes

All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. . . . How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.

I don't think nothing. I just do my work.

Too many Christians live their Christian lives inside their heads; it never gets out through hands and feet and lips.

Sometimes the image of the intellectual boxer did for me more harm than good. If a boxer has a reputation as an intellectual, some people no longer respect him as a fighter. With me it was always ‘Lennox should react, not think’. But that’s nonsense. Only the guy who controls his opponent wins.

Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

I've been stuck on John Eldredge lately. He's all about being a warrior outside of the church. I hate to think about this kind of stuff - I just like to do it.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Not what we think, but what we do, / Makes saints of us: all stiff and cold, / The outlines of the corpse show through / The cloth of gold.

People like things they can do now, not just think about.

It is very a dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice.

I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

I've come to understand that life is best lived, not conceptualized.

What we need to know about loving is no great mystery. We all know what constitutes loving behavior; we need but act upon it, not continually question it. Over-analysis often confuses the issue and in the end brings us no closer to insight. We sometimes become too busy classifying, separating, and examining, to remember that love is easy. It's we who make it complicated.

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

If you think, 'I'm jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet!' you're not going to do it. But if you just jump out, then you'll have an interesting ride.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.

If I thought about it before I went on, I would have never went on. So, therefore, you don't think about it; you have to talk yourself then into, 'Listen, this is it. This is the gig. Broadway or no Broadway, you've got to do your job.'

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.