-
Getting Going QuotesFamous Getting Going quotes by popular authors such as William Feather, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William James, Barbara Sher and others.
(http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee319/CAPSEC/arrow-down.gif)
[highlight-text]To do is to be.
Socrates
-
[highlight-text]To be is to do.
Plato
-
[highlight-text]Action is eloquence.
William Shakespeare
-
[highlight-text]When in doubt do it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
-
[highlight-text]And if not now when?
Talmud
-
[highlight-text]Something must happen!
Heinrich Boll
-
[highlight-text]Now go take on the day!
Dr. Laura Schlessinger
-
[highlight-text]The way to do is to be.
Lao-Tzu
-
[highlight-text]Every beginning is hard.
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]Above all try something.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
-
[highlight-text]The end of man is action.
Thomas Carlyle
-
[highlight-text]He who hesitates is last.
Mae West
-
[highlight-text]The only menace is inertia.
Saint John Perse
-
[highlight-text]To choose is also to begin.
Starhawk
-
[highlight-text]By his deeds we know a man.
African Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Delay not to seize the hour!
Aeschylus
-
[highlight-text]The shortest answer is doing.
English Proverb
-
[highlight-text]And now Lord what wait I for?
Bible
-
[highlight-text]Taking risks gives me energy.
Jay Chiat
-
[highlight-text]The first step is the hardest.
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]Performance releases pressure.
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]Time and tide wait for no man.
English Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Words gain credibility by deed.
Terence
-
[highlight-text]Act - act in the living present!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
-
[highlight-text]The time to hesitate is through.
Jim Morrison
-
[highlight-text]Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
Rachel Carson
-
[highlight-text]We will not know unless we begin.
Howard Zinn
-
[highlight-text]Talking is easy action difficult.
Spanish Proverb
-
[highlight-text]If you want to do something do it!
Plautus
-
[highlight-text]Men expect too much do too little.
Allen Tate
-
[highlight-text]Action is the antidote to despair.
Joan Baez
-
[highlight-text]Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
-
[highlight-text]The test of any man lies in action.
Pindar
-
[highlight-text]Begin doing what you want to do now.
Marie Beynon Ray
-
[highlight-text]The way to get ahead is to start now.
William Feather
-
[highlight-text]The beginning is half of every action.
Greek Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Wishing does not make a poor man rich.
Arab Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Everyone must row with the oars he has.
English Proverb
-
[highlight-text]The biggest sin is sitting on your ass.
Florynce Kennedy
-
[highlight-text]The important thing is somehow to begin.
Henry Moore
-
[highlight-text]Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen
-
[highlight-text]One of these days is none of these days.
H. G. Bohn
-
[highlight-text]You can't get rich sitting on the bench.
Phil Linz
-
[highlight-text]Action makes more fortunes than caution.
Vauvenargues
-
[highlight-text]The hour is ripe and yonder lies the way.
Virgil
-
[highlight-text]Step up the stairs or stare at the steps.
Ralph Nichols
-
[highlight-text]Procrastination is opportunity's assassin.
Victor Kiam
-
[highlight-text]Wisdom is harder to do than it is to know.
Yula Moses
-
[highlight-text]The keen spirit seizes the prompt occasion.
Hannah Moore
-
[highlight-text]The most effective way to do it is to do it.
Toni Cade Bambara
-
[highlight-text]Justice is a concept. Muscle is the reality.
Linda Blandford
-
[highlight-text]What you theoretically know vividly realize.
Francis Thompson
-
[highlight-text]What you don't do can be a destructive force.
Eleanor Roosevelt
-
[highlight-text]Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon.
Barbara Sher
-
[highlight-text]He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.
William Blake
-
[highlight-text]The opportunity is often lost by deliberating.
Publilius Syrus
-
[highlight-text]He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
J. C. F. von Schiller
-
[highlight-text]The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Sally Berger
-
[highlight-text]Do noble things do not dream them all day long.
Charles Kingsley
-
[highlight-text]Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.
Albert Camus
-
[highlight-text]Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
John Cage
-
[highlight-text]Do what you can with what you have where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
-
[highlight-text]Boast not of what thou would'st have done but do.
John Milton
-
[highlight-text]The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Fuller
-
[highlight-text]Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
-
[highlight-text]Necessity of action takes away the fear of the act.
Francis Quarles
-
[highlight-text]Indifference and inaction must always pay a penalty.
William Feather
-
[highlight-text]Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.
Herbert Hoover
-
[highlight-text]The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
Baltasar Gracian
-
[highlight-text]With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
-
[highlight-text]The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.
Elbert Hubbard
-
[highlight-text]We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
[highlight-text]You can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.
Liz Smith
-
[highlight-text]Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
Robert Louis Stevenson
-
[highlight-text]You can't steal second base and keep one foot on first.
Frederick B. Wilson
-
[highlight-text]I myself must mix with action lest I wither by despair.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
-
[highlight-text]If a man wants his dreams to come true he must wake up.
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]And all that you are sorry for is what you haven't done.
Margaret Widdemer
-
[highlight-text]The only things you regret are the things you didn't do.
Michael Curtiz
-
[highlight-text]We don't have enough time to premeditate all our actions.
Vauvenargues
-
[highlight-text]Why always 'not yet'? Do flowers in spring say 'not yet'?
Norman Douglas
-
[highlight-text]An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.
W. D. Howells
-
[highlight-text]A human being has no discernible character until he acts.
Constantine Nash
-
[highlight-text]Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
George Eliot
-
[highlight-text]One starts an action simply because one must do something.
T. S. Eliot
-
[highlight-text]If we really want to live we'd better start at once to try.
W. H. Auden
-
[highlight-text]Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.
Marilyn Monroe
-
[highlight-text]Nothing is too small to know and nothing too big to attempt.
William Van Horne
-
[highlight-text]A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Chinese Proverb
-
[highlight-text]What the Puritans gave the world was not thought but action.
Wendell Phillips
-
[highlight-text]This is a world of action and not for moping and droning in.
Charles Dickens
-
[highlight-text]Words are mere bubbles of water but deeds are drops of gold.
Chinese Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Commitment leads to action. Action brings your dream closer.
Marcia Wieder
-
[highlight-text]The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.
Charles M. Schwab
-
[highlight-text]Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
-
[highlight-text]The distance doesn't matter; only the first step is difficult.
Madame Marquise du Deffand
-
[highlight-text]A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]As long as you can start you are all right. The juice will come.
Ernest Hemingway
-
[highlight-text]Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption also.
William Gilmore Simms
-
[highlight-text]Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
James A. Garfield
-
[highlight-text]If deeds are wanting all words appear mere vanity and emptiness.
Greek Proverb
-
[highlight-text]To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.
Eva Young
-
[highlight-text]Action is the only reality; not only reality but morality as well.
Abbie Hoffman
-
[highlight-text]There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
-
[highlight-text]Can anything be sadder than work unfinished? Yes; work never begun.
Christina G. Rossetti
-
[highlight-text]Whenever you take a step forward you are bound to disturb something.
Indira Gandhi
-
[highlight-text]The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
Chinese Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Let us watch well our beginnings and results will manage themselves.
Alexander Clark
-
[highlight-text]You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
-
[highlight-text]Life is worth being lived but not worth being discussed all the time.
Isabelle Adfani
-
[highlight-text]I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Mark Twain
-
[highlight-text]The rewards in business go to the man who does something with an idea.
William Benton
-
[highlight-text]If you don't place your foot on the rope you'll never cross the chasm.
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]Knowing is not enough we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
[highlight-text]I like to deliver more than I promise instead of the other way around.
Dorothy Uhnak
-
[highlight-text]Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.
Liz Smith
-
[highlight-text]Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future act now without delay.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
[highlight-text]Honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.
Aristotle
-
[highlight-text]The things people discard tell more about them than the things they keep.
Hilda Lawrence
-
[highlight-text]Get good counsel before you begin; and when you have decided act promptly.
Sallust
-
[highlight-text]It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.
Joyce Carol Oates
-
[highlight-text]Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
-
[highlight-text]Men are alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.
Moliere
-
[highlight-text]The ordinary man is involved in action the hero acts. An immense difference.
Henry Miller
-
[highlight-text]We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.
Betty Friedan
-
[highlight-text]Even if you are on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
-
[highlight-text]He who is outside the door has already a good part of his journey behind him.
Dutch Proverb
-
[highlight-text]No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
Dorothy Day
-
[highlight-text]Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
Voltaire
-
[highlight-text]We have too many sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams
-
[highlight-text]Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.
Harry A. Hopf
-
[highlight-text]Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
William James
-
[highlight-text]If you miss the first buttonhole you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
[highlight-text]The most important thing about getting somewhere is starting right where we are.
Bruce Barton
-
[highlight-text]We must not waste life in devising means. It is better to plan less and do more.
William Ellery Channing
-
[highlight-text]In putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
Charles Baudelaire
-
[highlight-text]All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
-
[highlight-text]Who waits until the wind shall silent keep Will never find the ready hour to sow.
Helen Hunt Jackson
-
[highlight-text]We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
[highlight-text]Nothing at all will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
Samuel Johnson
-
[highlight-text]If you have something to do that is worthwhile doing don't talk about it ... do it.
George W. Biount
-
[highlight-text]When it comes to getting things done we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
Colleen C. Barrett
-
[highlight-text]Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
Reggie Leach
-
[highlight-text]He who deliberates fully before taking a step will spend his entire life on one leg.
Chinese Proverb
-
[highlight-text]Optimism unaccompanied by personal effort is merely a state of mind and not fruitful.
Edward L. Curtis
-
[highlight-text]Share the passion and action of your time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
-
[highlight-text]The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
-
[highlight-text]Putting off an easy thing makes it hard. Putting off a hard thing makes it impossible.
George Claude Lorimer
-
[highlight-text]Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.
Jawaharlal Nehru
-
[highlight-text]You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge one for yourself.
James A. Froude
-
[highlight-text]My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 'til a more convenient season.
Mary Todd Lincoln
-
[highlight-text]Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.
Brendan Francis
-
[highlight-text]To know what has to be done then do it comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
Sir William Osier
-
[highlight-text]Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come; you have to get up and make them.
Madam C. J. Walker
-
[highlight-text]The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Vorse
-
[highlight-text]To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
[highlight-text]What we make is more important than what we are particularly if making is our profession.
Dorothy L. Sayers
-
[highlight-text]Do not wait for ideal circumstances nor for the best opportunities; they will never come.
Janet Erskine Stuart
-
[highlight-text]Untilled ground however rich will bring forth thistles and thorns; so also the mind of man.
Therese of Lisieux
-
[highlight-text]Ef women want any rights more'n dey got why don't dey jes' take 'em and not be talkin' about it.
Sojourner Truth
-
[highlight-text]All talk of women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.
Victoria Claffin Woodhull
-
[highlight-text]And the things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those that got there first.
Steven Tyler
-
[highlight-text]Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard but takes the one before it and plays the game.
Wendell Phillips
-
[highlight-text]Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin; it should make you jump up and do something.
E. L. Simpson
-
[highlight-text]It is in your act that you exist not in your body. Your act is yourself and there is no other you.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-
[highlight-text]There are only three colors ten digits and seven notes; it's what we do with them that's important.
Ruth Ross
-
[highlight-text]Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
William Feather
-
[highlight-text]How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment we can start now start slowly changing the world!
Anne Frank
-
[highlight-text]The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
-
[highlight-text]Activity in back of a very small idea will produce more than inactivity and the planning of a genius.
James A. Worsham
-
[highlight-text]For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.
Henri Frederic Amiel
-
[highlight-text]We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing while others judge us by what we have already done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
-
[highlight-text]The individual activity of one man with backbone will do more than a thousand men with a mere wishbone.
William J. H. Boetcker
-
[highlight-text]If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street.
Ben Nicholas
-
[highlight-text]This one makes a net this one stands and wishes. Would you like to make a bet which one gets the fishes?
Chinese rhyme
-
[highlight-text]Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action a superior mind exists in torture.
Benedetto Croce
-
[highlight-text]Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more think less and stop watching ourselves live.
Nicolas de Chamfort
-
[highlight-text]If you can talk brilliantly about a problem it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
Stanley Kubrick
-
[highlight-text]He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
Horace
-
[highlight-text]One's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into action ... which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
-
[highlight-text]To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Robert Louis Stevenson
-
[highlight-text]Every action we take everything we do is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be.
Anne Bronte
-
[highlight-text]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
-
[highlight-text]I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to earth.
Pearl S. Buck
-
[highlight-text]No age or time of life no position or circumstance has a monopoly on success. Any age is the right age to start doing!
Anonymous
-
[highlight-text]When I talked no one listened to me. But as soon as I acted I became persuasive and I no longer find anyone incredulous.
Giosue Borsi
-
[highlight-text]It is no good hearing an inner voice or getting an inner prompting if you do not immediately act on that inner prompting.
David Spangler
-
[highlight-text]Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.
George A. Buttrick
-
[highlight-text]There is nothing to be gained by waiting for a better situation. You see where you are and you do what you can with that.
Jacob K. Javits
-
[highlight-text]One of the reasons why so few of us ever act instead of react is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
Henry Miller
-
[highlight-text]I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
-
[highlight-text]A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
-
[highlight-text]Thinking about swimming isn't much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away.
Barbara Sher
-
[highlight-text]All worthwhile men have good thoughts good ideas and good intentions but precious few of them ever translate those into action.
John Hancock Field
-
[highlight-text]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.
Georges Bernanos
-
[highlight-text]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
-
[highlight-text]When I am idle and shiftless my affairs become confused; when I work I get results ... not great results but enough to encourage me.
Edgar Watson Howe
-
[highlight-text]Sometimes we look so intently toward the pinnacle that we stumble over the steps leading to it. Development begins just where you are.
Mrs. Herman Stanley
-
[highlight-text]It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will have it if they cannot find it.
George Eliot
-
[highlight-text]We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
Frank Tibolt
-
[highlight-text]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
-
[highlight-text]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
-
[highlight-text]That is the principal thing: not to remain with the dream with the intention with the being in the mood but always forcibly to convert it into all things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
-
[highlight-text]How then find the courage for action?... By accepting the human condition more simply and candidly by dreading troubles less calculating less hoping more.
Henri Frederic Amiel
-
[highlight-text]The question for each man is not what he would do if he had the means time influence and educational advantages but what he will do with the things he has.
Frank Hamilton
-
[highlight-text]If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed races won or lasting happiness achieved.
Maurice Chevalier
-
[highlight-text]I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act write speak be I'll be sending messages on a ouija board cryptic complaints from the other side.
Audre Lorde
-
[highlight-text]The emotions are not always subject to reason ... but they are always subject to action. When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion action will.
William James
-
[highlight-text]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
-
[highlight-text]To do anything in this world worth doing we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.
Sydney Smith
-
[highlight-text]Few begin with anything like a clear view of what they want to do and the fortune they seek may come in a very different form from that which they have kept in view.
The Independent
-
[highlight-text]Most of life is routine-dull and grubby but routine is the mountain that keeps a man going. If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street.
Ben Nicholas
-
[highlight-text]It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart. But the first broadside puts all to rights.
Sir Walter Scott
-
[highlight-text]So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties it may be too late.
Lee Iacocca
-
[highlight-text]To always be intending to live a new life but never to find time to set about it; this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day and night to another till he is starved and destroyed.
John Tillotson
-
[highlight-text]The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards; they will be dissipated lost and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world or sunk in the slough of indolence.
Maria Edgeworth
-
[highlight-text]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
-
[highlight-text]Acting can work a peculiar magic on the actor ... it can cure you (at least for the length of a performance) of a whole variety of ailments. Migraine headaches miserable colds or toothaches will suddenly disappear as you're up there going through your paces.
Barbara Harris
-
[highlight-text]How many opportunities come along? If you wait for the right one that's wrong because it may never be right and what have you got to lose? Even if it's a disaster you've tried you've learned something you've had an adventure. And that doesn't mean you can't do it again.
Edward McCabe
-
[highlight-text]To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad