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Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind, born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality, in our mind. (Magdalena Abakanowicz)
- A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, 1990...
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. (Edward Abbey)
- b.1744 d.1818...
I begin to think that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life... Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe. (Abigail Adams)
Only during the action is the idea of matter influenced. (Pierre Alechinsky)
Don't let a day go by without doing something... no matter how small. (Robert G. Allen)
For purposes of action, nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will. (Henri-Frederic Amiel)
Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious. (Henri-Frederic Amiel)
The quality of life is determined by its activities. (Aristotle)
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. (Aristotle)
Action to an idea is like language to a child learning to speak. (Kathleen Arnason)
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream. (W. H. Auden)
Be impatient. All things don't come to those who wait. Push on with what you believe because life is very short. (Geoffrey Ballard)
It is easy to sit up and take notice. What is difficult is getting up and taking action. (Honore de Balzac)
Go to the object. Leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Do not impose yourself on the object. Become one with the object. Plunge deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. (Matsuo Basho)
It is easy to sit up and take notice. What is difficult is getting up and taking action. (Al Batt)
Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth. (Max Beerbohm)
Let a single complete action, in one place and one day, keep the theatre packed to the last. (Nicolas Boileau)
- The Ascent of Man, 1973...
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. (Jacob Bronowski)
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. (Charlotte Bronte)
I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done. (Gautama Buddha)
The food of hope is meditative action. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
But what I do I do because I like to do. (Anthony Burgess)
Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like. (Edward Burtynsky)
In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen. (Harry Callahan)
Always do whatever's next. (George Carlin)
Action hangs, as it were, ''dissolved'' in speech; in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow, and precipitates itself therefrom. (Thomas Carlyle)
Photography is an immediate reaction; drawing is a meditation. (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting. (Carlos Castaneda)
One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss. (Marc Chagall)
Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity. (Edwin H. Chapin)
As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. (Bruce Chatwin)
Nowhere so busy a man as he than he, and yet he seemed busier than he was. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
It is no use doing what you like; you have got to like what you do. (Winston Churchill)
Watch your actions, they become your habits. (Winston Churchill)
I have lived to know that the great secret of happiness is this: never suffer your energies to stagnate. The old adage of too many irons in the fire, conveys an abominable lie. You cannot have too many – poker, tongs and all – keep them all going. (Adam Clarke)
Men of action are favored by the Goddess of luck. (George S. Clason)
The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives... the more the difficulties will increase. (Carl von Clausewitz)
As we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it's also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we're not so sure about. (John Cleese)
In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking. (Georges Clemenceau)
- b.551 BC d.479 BC...
The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action. (Confucius)
To learn something but not to do is really not to learn. To know something but not to do is really not to know. (Stephen R. Covey)
I feel lost not doing art, unsatisfied, anxious, bored. Everything else in comparison seems not terribly important. (Nancy Crow)
We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. (John Dewey)
You have to make it happen. (Denis Diderot)
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. (Benjamin Disraeli)
If I rest, I rust. (Placido Domingo)
What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter. (Peter Drucker)
He not busy being born is busy dying. (Bob Dylan)
The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake. (Meister Johann Eckhart)
Seeming to do is not doing. (Thomas Edison)
The legs are the wheels of creativity. (Albert Einstein)
Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. (George Eliot)
Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries. (George Eliot)
The lazy man aims at nothing, and generally hits it. (James Ellis)
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. (Ralph Ellison)
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas. (Brian Eno)
What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. (Nora Ephron)
The dualities in the activity of making art are endless... such as the conjunction of inarticulate form with aesthetic form, or the idea and the artifact. (Olinda Everett)
I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set. (Federico Fellini)
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you're moving. (Timothy Ferriss)
On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics. (Richard Feynman)
Concepts can never be presented to me merely, they must be knitted into the structure of my being, and this can only be done through my own activity. (M. P. Follett)
I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it. (Michael J. Fox)
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live. (Anatole France)
Words may show a man's wit but actions his meaning. (Benjamin Franklin)
I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself. (Buckminster Fuller)
Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. (Neil Gaiman)
Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame. (Mahatma Gandhi)
Keep busy while you are waiting for something to happen. (Robert Genn)
The most decisive actions of our life are most often the unconsidered actions. (Andre Gide)
Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go dare before you die. / Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Fresh activity is the only means of overcoming adversity. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
- The Wind in the Willows, 1908...
There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do. (Kenneth Grahame)
Do rather than don't. (Irwin Greenberg)
Painting is an act, not a conversation. (Andrew Hamilton)
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have. (Dag Hammarskjold)
A bell's not a bell 'til you ring it, / A song's not a song 'til you sing it, / Love in your heart wasn't put there to stay, / Love isn't love 'til you give it away! (Oscar Hammerstein)
Disaster beats stasis. Better a rolling stone than a moss-covered rock... (Evan Harris)
Like what you do; if you don't like it, do something else. (Paul Harvey)
Some talk in quarto volumes and act in pamphlets. (Henry S. Haskins)
To do nothing is the way to be nothing. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have. (William Hazlitt)
Never confuse motion with action. (Ernest Hemingway)
The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state. (Robert Henri)
Action is the real measure of intelligence. (Napoleon Hill)
Anything you can do with your hands and feet. Great. (Damien Hirst)
One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action. (Eric Hoffer)
Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses. (Sarah Orne Jewett)
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. (Jasper Johns)
- The Art of Creative Thinking...
Doing what matters is what matters. (Rod Judkins)
We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action. (Immanuel Kant)
To be is to do. (Immanuel Kant)
I feel there's everything to do yet. (Anish Kapoor)
- The Shawshank Redemption...
Get busy living or get busy dying. (Stephen King)
What you do when you don't have to, determines what you will do when you can no longer help it. (Rudyard Kipling)
Each instant of his life, a task, he never rests... (James Kirkup)
In my productive activity, every time a type grows beyond the stage of its genesis, and I have about reached the goal, the intensity gets lost very quickly, and I have to look for new ways. (Paul Klee)
There is not first understanding and then action. When you understand, that very understanding is action. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
The different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices. (Barbara Kruger)
Be liberal in deeds and conservative in thought. (Janine Kulbacki)
Every individual has a responsibility to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes are not sufficient; we must become actively engaged. (Dalai Lama)
No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable. (Letitia Landon)
No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable. (Walter Savage Landor)
It is surprising what people can do when they have to, and how little most people will do when they don't have to. (Walter Linn)
It is what we do easily and what we like to do that we do well. (Orison Swett Marden)
I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands. (Kerry James Marshall)
In art, the genuine creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. (Henri Matisse)
It is better to paint for one minute a day than to think about it for 24 hours a day... (Andrew McDermott)
If you're not actively involved in getting what you want, you don't really want it. (Peter McWilliams)
All art is a reaction to the first line drawn. Unless the artist sits in front of the canvas and paints, there can be no art... unless one acts, nothing is created or discovered. (Michael Michalko)
It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. (Moliere)
The human hand allows the mind to reveal itself. (Maria Montessori)
Art is a continuous activity with no separation between past and present. (Henry Moore)
I like to use my hands and make things... It might seem pretty stupid or pointless but that doesn't matter... some of the most interesting work is the stuff that starts like that – out of a raw need for activity. (Bruce Nauman)
Just go out there and do what you have to do. (Martina Navratilova)
Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
If you don't execute your ideas, they die. (Roger von Oech)
An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body. (George Smith Patton, Jr.)
Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all. (Norman Vincent Peale)
I focus, I invent, I transform, I challenge, I attempt, I observe, I perform. (Philippe Petit)
One must act in painting as in life, directly. (Pablo Picasso)
Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us. (Plotinus)
A rolling stone gathers no moss. (English proverb)
Action, not words; A man of words and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds; Words are leaves, deeds are fruits. (Latin proverb)
Idle hands are the Devil's work-list. (Gail Wiseman Reed)
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist. (Ad Reinhardt)
Draw this line, only as you feel it to be the most worthwhile act of your life. (Paul Reps)
Be great in act, as you have been in thought. (Jean Paul Richter)
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it. (Faith Ringgold)
The path to success is to take massive, determined action. (Tony Robbins)
Our actions are like the terminations of verses, which we rhyme as we please. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy. (Wilhelm Roentgen)
Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction. (Will Rogers)
Stacking stones is such a universal impulse, an activity that has gone on around the world as long as humans have been here. (Ugo Rondinone)
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. (Theodore Roosevelt)
Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster. (Theodore Roosevelt)
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth. (Rumi)
The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Action is eloquence. (William Shakespeare)
What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things. (Anna Deavere Smith)
I am, therefore I do. (Lynda Gaelyn Smith)
Intention, good or bad, is not enough. (John Steinbeck)
I am not an action painter. Each painting is an act. The result of action and the fulfilment of action... (Clyfford Still)
There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity. (Shunryu Suzuki)
You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. (Rabindranath Tagore)
I must love myself in action, lest I wither in despair. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain. (Robert Townsend)
Most people engage in activities that are tension-relieving rather than goal-achieving. (Brian Tracy)
You are actually doing something. You are getting into this process without making sure that what you're doing is okay. Things are actually taking place, almost of their own accord, very simply and directly. That is meditation. (Chogyam Trungpa)
Do something. Either lead, follow or get out of the way. (Ted Turner)
An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox. (Lao Tzu)
We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day. (Brenda Ueland)
When you are what you do, then when you don't you're not. (Author unknown)
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. (John Updike)
When I go into a painting, I'm sort of in its thrall. And it's not so much about me – but about what's happening in that painting. (David Urban)
As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-'teleological activity.' He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. (Thorstein Veblen)
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen: even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work. (William Arthur Ward)
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth. (Evelyn Waugh)
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. (Oscar Wilde)
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. (H. H. Williams)
- Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back...
'All right, I'll give it a try.' (Luke Skywalker) 'No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try.' (Yoda)
The whole effect of activity is to enrich the feeling of the other. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
Get off your knees and do. Words without action is death. (Miles Patrick Yohnke)
Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do. (Lin Yutang)
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