Top 100 Act Not Quotes
#1. There is no act of love that is not an act of work or courage. No exceptions.
M. Scott Peck
#2. If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.
Marcus Aurelius
#3. You do not need permission to be you. Just be your authentic, brilliant, one-soul-only self. You are a marvel. Act like it!
Toni Sorenson
#4. The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#5. What I thought as a young adult is you act like you have it together whether or not you do because that is what church people do. That is not what God has called us to do.
Beth Moore
#6. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#7. I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. ( ... ) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.
Slavoj Zizek
#8. Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!
Terry Pratchett
#9. But shall we be happy, to say that we live in the dusk rather than in the full night? Shall we rejoice that we shall only suffer, while your offspring will be the ones to know the torments of the damned? Shall this be why we do not act?
Robin Hobb
#10. We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down, Trot!
Charles Dickens
#12. MANY MANAGE TO SEPARATE THEIR LIFE FROM THEIR FILMS. THEY LIVE ONE WAY AND EXPRESS OTHER IDEAS IN THEIR WORKS. THEY ARE ABLE TO SPLIT THEIR CONSCIENCE. I CAN'T. TO ME CINEMA IS NOT JUST MY JOB: IT'S MY LIFE, AND EACH FILM IS AN ACT OF MY LIFE.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#13. Those who are actively seeking enlightenment will not find it because the act of looking for it is the distraction from it.
Enza Vita
#14. Most people are not, I have realized, emotionally well-practiced. We tend to misunderstand our fears and misinterpret our desires. We act when we ought to sit still; we feel when we should instead think, and in the end, this allows our emotions to handle us as opposed to us handling them.
Lynn Toler
#15. What America did in Vietnam and the Congo - we feel. And as a result come these demonstrations. I am not defending the act of burning USIS books. We deplore it. But we can understand the motives of the students.
Sukarno
#16. A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.
Anne Truitt
#17. I'm not going to start churning out what you expect. If you want me to be a manufactured act, you can f*** off.
Lady Gaga
#18. Devilish men should not be allowed to hold kittens, babies, or bouquets of wildflowers. There ought to be an Act of Parliament.
Tessa Dare
#19. Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.
Charles De Secondat
#20. If you want to act, do school plays. If they're not there, create them, and the same with local repertory. They are the grounding for a lot of people. Make it happen.
William Kircher
#21. Happiness and unhappiness are in the heart and spirit of each one of us: If you feel unhappy, then place yourself above that and act so that your happiness does not get to be dependent on anything.
Catherine The Great
#22. My dream is not Hollywood, but to perform my act in English to 30 people in a Soho comedy club, to show New Yorkers what they look like from the French point of view.
Gad Elmaleh
#23. The sage does not act and therefore does not fail, does not seize and therefore does not lose.
Laozi
#24. It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.
Pam Brown
#25. In this world is not the creative act of the genius always a protest against the inertia of the mass?
Adolf Hitler
#26. The greatest act of courage is not falling in love But, despite everything, falling in love again.
Robin Wayne Bailey
#27. I always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'
Harvey Pekar
#28. Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.
Andre Malraux
#29. Lovers cannot imagine any opposition, no matter how small, to the beloved. They cannot endure to see the beloved veiled by something that causes Him to be forgotten. Moreover, lovers regard as futile any speech not about the beloved, and any act not related to Him as ingratitude and disloyalty.
Fethullah Gulen
#30. Time does not act on memory to soften the edges, blur the details; if anything, it sharpens them. Emotions may lose their acid outlines, but not places and people, not if you wish to retain them.
Susan Moody
#31. As a rapper, you sort of act in music videos and in the persona you adopt onstage. You kinda have to put yourself out there and be courageous even to be a rapper. So, to step into acting was not that difficult a transition to make.
Queen Latifah
#32. A democratic medical establishment does not alter people's bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.
Alice Dreger
#33. What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
John Cage
#34. Forgiveness is not the act of doing nothing to the one who hurts you. It's easy to do nothing, but hard to forgive.
Ogwo David Emenike
#35. It's not as if you can act bigger to fit the surroundings or the budget more. Whatever, it just doesn't work that way.
Famke Janssen
#36. When you're angry you act according to your emotions, not with your mind.
Lakshmi Menon
#37. The community does not fight crime well by chasing it; after-the-fact, crime has won and the target of violence is injured or worse. Crime is fought best not by chasing it, but by facing it before it can become a completed act.
Crime is fought best at the scene of the violence.
John Longenecker
#38. But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
D.H. Lawrence
#39. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. I do not intend for 'honor, courage, and commitment' to be just words; I expect them to frame the way that we live and act.
Charles C. Krulak
#42. Christian researcher George Barna concludes, "American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century because Jesus' modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus.
Skye Jethani
#44. It is the ultimate metafictional act, not homicide but suicide. (Wallace would say that one of the problems of metafiction is that there is no difference.)
D.T. Max
#45. The desert wears ... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting
but waiting for what?
Edward Abbey
#46. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially. ... In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him. ... He is always and everywhere. ... He is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting.5
James Gleick
#47. Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.
Benjamin Disraeli
#48. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's strategy is to lead from behind. It sounds like what he is outlining is not to lead at all. We cannot continue to outsource foreign policy. We must lead. We are the most powerful nation in the world. We need to begin to act like it, again.
Marco Rubio
#49. He understood very little about this strange situation, and to act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences.
Stephen King
#50. Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.
Gregory Maguire
#51. Giving respect is an obligation, not a favor; it is an act of maturity, birthed in a profound understanding of God's good grace.
Gary L. Thomas
#52. Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.
Peter Rollins
#53. Maybe the ability to confer attention to another person was not simply common courtesy, but was the fundamental act of humanity. When it came down to it, all we ever really have to give each other is our attention. Wasn't that what love was? Paying selfless attention?
Carolyn Jourdan
#54. It doesn't matter what's wrong with him. We're not going to act like he doesn't exist. Not anymore.
Carrie Butler
#55. Dream not that worldlings will admire you, or that the more holy and the more Christ-like you are, the more peaceably people will act towards you. They prized not the polished gem, how should they value the jewel in the rough?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#56. In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
Henry Miller
#57. Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.
Charles Colson
#58. Those who are inspired are willing to pay a premium or endure inconvenience, even personal suffering. Those who are able to inspire will create a following of people - supporters, voters, customers, workers - who act for the good of the whole not because they have to, but because they want to.
Simon Sinek
#59. We need to keep our ears open to the realities of life. If we don't act on life and take action to make things happen, it will act on us and give us results we might not want.
Robin Sharma
#60. I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will
a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul ... the bloodiest of mutilations.
Jim Fergus
#61. I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary Oliver
#62. Dreams in your life are like light bulbs that brighten your room. But having them on the ceiling is just not enough; you got to make an effort by pressing on the switch and there it goes taking away the darkness!
Israelmore Ayivor
#63. I wasn't the high-school play queen or anything. And my parents would let not me act until I graduated from college.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#64. If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.
George Bernard Shaw
#65. I was always much more shy. All I knew was that I loved to act. But I don't know about the other part of it. I'm not sure I had the chutzpah to go and prove yourself.
Joan Allen
#66. I understand more than I want to. People act like love is a gift, but it's not. It's theft. It's a goddamn tragedy. Love is losing a vital organ to a man who will never give his in return.
Skye Warren
#67. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
Donna Tartt
#68. The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized.
Thomas E. Mann
#70. Murder in and of itself was not engaging; it was the drive to kill, the human factor, the fervors and furies motivating the dreadful act that rendered it compelling. Alice
Kate Morton
#71. If one just intellectually understands the view it will not help! One must actually experience it! There are many people who understand the view but don't experience it. If the view were experienced, they wouldn't act the way they do!
Padampa Sangye
#72. It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
Bill Vaughan
#73. There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act - a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.
Jon Krakauer
#74. So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Alan Watts
#75. One-act [plays] are not strikingly remunerative, but, on the other hand, the veriest dullard could not spend more than a week in writing one.
Arnold Bennett
#76. When you're reading, you're laughing and not quite noticing what's happening. One second you're still kind of chuckling, and then all of sudden you're in the third act of the book and in this very dark and claustrophobic place.
Moshe Kasher
#77. In the context of your dreams,knowledge will always gives you enough reasons not to act. Act regardless and execute xceptionally
Kevin Kelly
#78. Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies.
David Byrne
#79. Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
Pablo Casals
#80. When you truly love someone, you want to please and honor them by the way you act. How you treat someone shows whether or not you really care about them.
Billy Graham
#81. One thing is certain. I am not afraid to act as my conscience dictates, no matter what the world may think ...
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
#82. Forgiveness is not a single act, but a matter of constant practice
Diana Gabaldon
#83. To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale.
Edouard Vuillard
#84. I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.
Graciela Iturbide
#85. I'm not comfortable telling my kids how they should be or how they should think or how they should act or anything else.
Mark Martin
#86. We ought not to decide hastily against the words of an Act of Parliament.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#87. A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.
Matthew J. Kirby
#88. We do not act as your precious Christians do, slaughtering other Christians for believing the wrong way. Yes, we ask for payment. That is the price of safety. But we allow all people under our rule to believe what they will, so long as they do not disturb the peace.
Kiersten White
#89. Somebody might get criticized for doing some movie that totally sucks, then turn around and be incredible. Every actor goes through that, not just musicians who act.
Lance Bass
#90. In my relationships with persons I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not.
Carl R. Rogers
#91. Note to self; try to act normal when coming in contact with the prettiest boy you've ever seen. Note. Mouth closing and drool sucked back in and hopefully not noticed. Check.
Amy Lunderman
#92. It is therapeutic for me to act, to be able to slip into somebody else's skin, and know it's not you, but know that you bring a lot of yourself to it. At times in my life it's provided me with a lot of confusion. It's also provided me with a lot of discovery.
Sarah Shahi
#93. People act as though the hybrid could solve all of our problems - which is certainly not the case.
Martin Winterkorn
#94. There's a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I'd hate to see them on stage with a dog act.
Joan Blondell
#95. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
George Orwell
#96. The purpose of life - if it may be said to have purpose - is not ease. It is to choose, and to act upon the choice. In that task, we are not measured by outcomes. We are measured only by daring and effort and resolve.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#97. My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.
Al Gore
#98. I don't think that I look, act and feel younger than I am, I know I do. I'm not irresponsible, just hyper and active like a younger person is. I have a lot of younger friends. I don't have any problems in particular with people my own age, save that I sometimes think they are boring.
Rudy Simone
#99. Here's the problem: I don't like who I've become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity - it's not a conscious act, but a reflexive one.
Josh Radnor
#100. Marriage,love and commitment does not give a man permission to act like Julius Caesar by pushing his partner into sexual promiscuity like a concubine for his own sexual pleasures.
Sheree' Griffin
