Quotes by American Authors - Page 165

Now is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream.
Barbara Sher
Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon.
Barbara Sher
Do what you can with what you have where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
Charles Sanders Peirce
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities the strength the wisdom the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen.
Charlton Ogburn
Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard but takes the one before it and plays the game.
Wendell Phillips
Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
William Feather
You decide you'll wait for your pitch. Then as the ball starts toward the plate you think about your stance. And then you think about your swing. And then you realize that the ball that went past you for a strike was your pitch.
Bobby Murcer
We must not waste life in devising means. It is better to plan less and do more.
William Ellery Channing
Thinking about swimming isn't much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away.
Barbara Sher
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
John Cage
When it comes to getting things done we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
Colleen C. Barrett
Activity in back of a very small idea will produce more than inactivity and the planning of a genius.
James A. Worsham
We have too many sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams
Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.
W. D. Howells
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Stanley Kubrick
I like to deliver more than I promise instead of the other way around.
Dorothy Uhnak
Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.
Herbert Hoover
Action not words are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.
George Washington
All talk of women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.
Victoria Claffin Woodhull
Ef women want any rights more'n dey got why don't dey jes' take 'em and not be talkin' about it.
Sojourner Truth
For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
Indifference and inaction must always pay a penalty.
William Feather
Above all try something.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The only things you regret are the things you didn't do.
Michael Curtiz
And all that you are sorry for is what you haven't done.
Margaret Widdemer
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
What you don't do can be a destructive force.
Eleanor Roosevelt
There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F Kennedy
Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.
George A. Buttrick
Act-act in the living present!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
James A. Garfield
Men expect too much do too little.
Allen Tate
To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something while to secure it in this world we must do something.
Charlotte P. Gilman
Optimism unaccompanied by personal effort is merely a state of mind and not fruitful.
Edward L. Curtis
Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.
Harry A. Hopf
Share the passion and action of your time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The biggest sin is sitting on your ass.
Florynce Kennedy
Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption also.
William Gilmore Simms
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought but action.
Wendell Phillips
Now go take on the day!
Dr. Laura Schlessinger
All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
The individual activity of one man with backbone will do more than a thousand men with a mere wishbone.
William J. H. Boetcker
Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come you have to get up and make them.
Madame C. J. Walker
Don't wait for your "ship to come in " and feel angry and cheated when it doesn't. Get going with something small.
Irene Kassorla
No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
Dorothy Day
To choose is also to begin.
Starhawk
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Sally Berger
You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood however much you preach posture or agree unless you live it.
Faith Baldwin
Let us watch well our beginnings and results will manage themselves.
Alexander Clark
We will not know unless we begin.
Howard Zinn
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
Rachel Carson
The most effective way to do it is to do it.
Toni Cade Bambara
The most important thing about getting somewhere is starting right where we are.
Bruce Barton
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Vorse
Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers