Best 75 quotes in «inaction quotes» category

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. "A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil. But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise. If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators and war and blood. "It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship. It's I who murdered Rabbi de Verez. It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord! "Is it too late?

We are the sum of our actions, and of our inactions, yes, that is easy enough to understand. What comes harder is finding ourselves the sum of our emotions, which flicker, altered by experience, by the things we cannot bear to tell ourselves, by the trouble we accrue, the flattening and tamping down as we learn how not to be hurt. As we learn protection and the easiest means of protection.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

We have to accept that any action we take might promote an equal and opposite reaction that we do not want. We have to realize that even the most noble actions or most obviously correct course can have its dark side that we cannot control or reason our way out of. The fighter of the "just war" must understand that her actions will result in the deaths of other humans; many of whom may be innocent. The pacifist who refuses all war must realize that his inaction might likewise result in the deaths of the innocent. There are no actions without contradiction—and yet we must act, for not to act is also a contradictory action with both positive and negative effects.

We may not always be able to control what we are, but we can control what we do. Everyone has a dark side, but we have a choice not to act on it.

We must remember balance and moderation. Patience can be spiritually enriching and virtuous… but when taken in excess, it turns to procrastination, the poison of inaction.

When there is so much to be done, our “To do list” never see an action due to the confusion on where to start, we keep wasting time in making changes to the list and not working on the list, and there comes a time when confusion overpowers the intention to start.

Who reflects too much will accomplish little.

You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless.

Those who claim to be on the side of good yet do nothing to fight evil are on the side of evil.

We injure ourselves by wishing; continous inaction cripples the soul.

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

You are where you are right now because of the actions you've taken, or maybe, the inaction you've taken.

You don't need to sit on a throne before you have the chance to dream; you don't have to feel fat meat in-between your molars to become a strategic dreamer. You can be a dreamer once you can think; dreams are germinate from imaginations; and survive through actions! Indecision weakens dreams; inaction kills them!

You must never stay at the station where you feel unhappy! Unhappiness combined with inaction always creates deeper unhappiness! The solution is very simple: Leave the station; trust the motion because only motion will take you to the new stations!

Your life will be simplified when you choose inaction when no action is required and choose action when action is required!

All choices are fraught with peril, but inaction is the most perilous of all.

You may not have a clue of what lies ahead, but it’s better to act on life than simply let life act on you.

Inaction is perhaps the greatest mistake of all.

Awareness isn't passive. It directly leads to action (or inaction).

Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future.

It often takes more courage to be a passenger than a driver.

One has to speak out and stand up for one's convictions. Inaction at a time of conflagration is inexcusable.

Indifference and inaction must always pay a penalty.

Lack of orders is no excuse for inaction.

Take the word of experience, I speak the truth: inaction is safest in danger.

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

You can't remain inactive in the face of injustice without, to some extent, being guilty of it.

We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

Although he longed to see Louise, and to see Aleph, he increasingly lacked the will to go.

As he rose to go and held Louise's hand and gazed at her he felt for a moment his old love for her taking possession of his whole being. They looked at each other. I feed upon this looking, thought Clement, but does she? I don't know, and I cannot ask. I am terrified of saying something which would wound our whole precious relationship. We are well as we are. I love her, that's all, that is my drama.

As compassionate beings, we cannot harm others, not even through our inaction.

Anything or everything can happen. You determine how good or bad they are

Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair:

But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.

Change does not surface when you are not ready to be the catalyst. Your reaction matters, not your inaction.

Become a river and then nothing is needed. That’s what The Secret of the Golden Flower says: Achieve inaction through action, achieve effortlessness through effort. But first comes the effort, the action—it will melt you—and then the river starts flowing. In that very flow it has reached the ocean.

Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.

Doing nothing was as honourable as any available course of action. Think of Hamlet, think of Job, think of Jesus before Pilate.

Count Ayakura’s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement. Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura’s version of political theory.

Count Tolstoy preached inaction. It seems he had no need. We "inact" remarkably. Idleness, just that idleness Tolstoy dreamed of, a free, conscious idling that despises labour, this is one of the chief characteristics of our time.

Do precedes done. No precedes none.

Friend: We are here. Already here. Within. A train approaches a wall at a fatal rate of speed. You hold a switch in your hand, that accomplishes you know not what: do you throw it? Disaster is otherwise assured. It costs you nothing. Why not try?

Free yourself from the need to blame others. There are two reasons that you are where you are right now; action or inaction.

Fate is nothing but the past in the future. It is only an excuse for inaction.

I can't see how anything can ever happen to us — I mean, I feel as if, if we leave this place, we shall crumble to pieces.

Hope lies beyond inaction! When inaction ends, hope rises like the sun! Inertia is the enemy of hope!

If I were to do nothing, I'd be guilty of complicity.

I have met people who have ruined their entire lives because of procrastination. They were unaware of why they never took a step, but I could easily see their Procrasdemon standing beside them.

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I've sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. I've never had a knack for the active life. I've always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I've always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. I've always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn't tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn't live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.