81 Action-Inspiring Quotes

In the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, finding the motivation to take action can often feel like an uphill battle. Whether you're striving to achieve personal goals, overcome obstacles, or spark change, the right words can serve as a powerful catalyst. To help fuel your journey, we’ve curated a collection of the top 81 action-inspiring quotes. These nuggets of wisdom, drawn from the minds of visionaries, leaders, and thinkers, are sure to ignite your drive and propel you toward your ambitions. Dive in and let these quotes be the spark that lights your path forward.

1. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

2. “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” - John Locke

3. “At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.” - Thomas A. Kempis

4. “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.” - James Baldwin

5. “We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.” - Mother Teresa

6. “You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.” - Hermann Hesse

7. “Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.” - R.A. Salvatore

8. “I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.” - George Eliot

9. “It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

10. “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

11. “Belief means nothing without actions” - Randa Abdel-Fattah

12. “The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.” - Abraham Verghese

13. “While intent is the seed of manifestation, action is the water that nourishes the seed. Your actions must reflect your goals in order to achieve true success.” - Steve Maraboli

14. “The universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” - Steve Maraboli

15. “Your life is a print-out of your thoughts.” - Steve Maraboli

16. “I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.” - Oscar Wilde

17. “In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.” - William Kingdon Clifford

18. “One thing you have to realize from now on is that it doesn't matter if this is a dream or not. Survival depends on what you do, not what you think.” - Rebecca McKinsey

19. “What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.” - Jason Fried

20. “The future is greatly different than your life now, the actions that you take must also be greatly different. You cannot do the same thing and get something different.” - Steve Maraboli

21. “Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.” - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

22. “If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” - Anita Roddick

23. “We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.” - Anna Deavere Smith

24. “But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.” - Patricia Highsmith

25. “Every action triggers a reaction.” - C. G. Watson

26. “Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions.” - Dallin H. Oaks

27. “Actions always have consequences!” - Joel Coen

28. “To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.” - Tom Robbins

29. “Our thoughts dictate how we feel; so it is important to recognize that we are as we think we are” - Jeremy Aldana

30. “People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.” - Chad Harbach

31. “What you do teaches faster, and has a lasting impression, far beyond what you say.” - T.F. Hodge

32. “Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.” - Criss Jami

33. “I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.” - Criss Jami

34. “After awhile you realize that putting your actions where your mouth is makes you less likely to have to put your money where your mouth is.” - Criss Jami

35. “Stop pointing fingers and placing blame on others. Your life can only change to the degree that you accept responsibility for it.” - Steve Maraboli

36. “When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall.” - Adolf Hitler

37. “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inactions, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury” - John Mills

38. “The world is my church. My actions are my prayer. My behavior is my creed.” - Steve Maraboli

39. “…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. ""What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?” - Jesse Ball

40. “It is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.” - Jane Austen

41. “Can an absence of action be construed as a negative action?” - Tamar Cohen

42. “It has been my experience that those who claim to be the most spiritual are usually the least so.” - Steve Maraboli

43. “When you accept a leadership role, you take on extra responsibility for your actions toward others.” - Kelley Armstrong

44. “Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.” - Frank Herbert

45. “Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.” - Anton Chekhov

46. “He wanted to say that all this talk of feelings was irrelevant. Thatemotions come and go and can't be controlled, so there's no reason to worry about them. That in the end, people should be judged by their actions, since in the end, it was actions that defined everyone.” - Nicholas Sparks

47. “In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.” - Steve Maraboli

48. “It has been noted that actions speak louder than words. Truth is, I have found that during many situations in life, words are just noise... and actions are the ONLY things that speak.” - Steve Maraboli

49. “Your choice is to be active or passive in your responses.” - Deborah Day

50. “September 11… I will never forget feeling scared and vulnerable… I will never forget feeling the deep sad loss of so many lives… I will never forget the smell of the smoke that reached across the water and delivered a deep feeling of doom into my gut… I will never forget feeling the boosted sense of unity and pride… I will never forget seeing the courageous actions of so many men and women… I will never forget seeing people of all backgrounds working together in community… I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy… I will never forget seeing what love can heal…” - Steve Maraboli

51. “The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond.” - Paolo Bacigalupi

52. “What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.” - George Bernard Shaw

53. “You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.” - Matthew Quick

54. “Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.” - Iris Murdoch

55. “There are seasons when to be still demands immeasurably higher strength than to act.” - Margaret Bottome

56. “There are only 3 things that can make your dreams come true: your thoughts, your words, and your actions.” - MIke Dooley

57. “Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends...” - Thomas Hardy

58. “I don’t believe in signs. I believe in words, and action, and doing. And what you’re doing is sitting and waiting and that is one hundred percent unacceptable.” - Lauren Blakely

59. “Empowerment is being aware that there is no one to blame for my choices and actions; that I have a personal choice and responsibility for my life.” - Steve Maraboli

60. “Gamache watched the old poet. He knew what was looming behind the Mountain. What crushed all before it. The thing the Hermit most feared. The Mountain most feared.Conscience....Which is why, Gamache knew, it was vital to be aware of actions in the present. Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you.And found you ...Who wouldn't be afraid of this?” - Louise Penny

61. “Will you, then, never grow weary of being unjust?” - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

62. “I can only control my actions, not their reactions," Senna replied. "But I have to live with both.” - Amber Argyle

63. “You may not like what I see but I don't like what you do.” - Donna Lynn Hope

64. “As if he conveyed by actions what he could never say in words. Would never say in words.” - Maya Banks

65. “Change. Adapt. Bend so as not to be broken. Let opportunity guide your actions.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

66. “A person doesn't feel, then act; rather, he acts, then feels. Change actions to change feelings.” - Orrin Woodward

67. “You're just setting yourself up for pain and anguish if you do something like that."But pain and anguish were everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use.” - Naomi Shihab Nye

68. “My relationship stays strong because I serenade her with my actions and I write poetry in her heart with my deeds. My endless love is expressed with more than just my words; my love is lived as a verb.” - Steve Maraboli

69. “Pretend those around you are deaf to your words. Let your actions speak and communicate your feelings and intentions. This way of living ensures the potency of your message is delivered and serves as a gauge against our verbal nonsense.” - Steve Maraboli

70. “Your actions must reflect your goals in order to experience true success. Don't just wish, DO! Don't just dream, BE! Let today be the day you create a plan and follow it.” - Steve Maraboli

71. “You express the truth of your character with the choice of your actions.” - Steve Maraboli

72. “Let today be the day you finally stop having a conflict between your actions and your goals. When you align your greatest intent with purposeful action, you create a universal symphony serenading your success!” - Steve Maraboli

73. “Our relationships are nourished and shaped by the commitment we express through our actions. Don't just speak; ACT!” - Steve Maraboli

74. “You may pray to God to remove the hills on your way and fill every pothole on your path; but don’t be surprised if God gives you a shovel to do so!” - Israelmore Ayivor

75. “Our minds of infinite possibilities have been plowed, seeded and cultivated by every word, institution and sacred belief we hold dear, to produce a foul harvest of exclusion, apathy, brute domination and death.” - Bryant McGill

76. “The way I see it people don't do what they want to do often enough. They just do some alternative which they'd kind of like to do, which isn't the same thing at all, and as a result that thing isn't enough and they end up depressed and annoyed with everyone else around them.” - Will Davis

77. “When love comes first, actions will follow.” - Michael Thomas Sunnarborg

78. “Twas such a useless thing. And so unnecessary. Many had suffered for the actions of a few. Wasn't that always the way of things? The collective suffered for the actions of an inept, ineffectual leader.” - Maya Banks

79. “I used to hold grudges until I realized that most people are narcissistic and their actions are driven by an unhealthy self-interest and not maliciousness towards me.” - Steve Maraboli

80. “You can speak with spiritual eloquence, pray in public, and maintain a holy appearance... but it is your behavior that will reveal your true character.” - Steve Maraboli

81. “Only a fool believes that his actions don't shape the world.” - Richelle E. Goodrich