The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Robert Louis Stevenson

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.
Stephen Fry

Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.
W. Edwards Deming

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
William Butler Yeats

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
Flannery O'Connor

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.
Eric Hoffer

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.
Eric Hoffer

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.
Norman Cousins

All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient.
John Stuart Mill

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
Honore de Balzac

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
Honore De Balzac

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Honore De Balzac

Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal