Top 100 Human Action Quotes
#1. What should move us to action is human dignity: the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.
Dominique De Menil
#2. It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.
Ludwig Von Mises
#3. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of action.
Aristotle.
#4. The Prince to a slightly more upbeat view of human action. In order "not to rule out our free will," he arrives at a formula by which Fortune is "the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.
Ross King
#5. Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies-hunger, misery, and despair.
Harry S. Truman
#6. There you are; human nature in action, wrongdoers, blaming everybody but themselves. We are all like that.
Dale Carnegie
#7. Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.
Clarence Darrow
#8. Every war, every plague is God's judgment. But every man who rises up to stop the wars and the plagues is God's instrument. Human action is God's will, not blind indifference in the face of suffering.
John Kramer
#9. In my own case, I'm an artist, and I'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action, and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences.
Golan Levin
#10. I've always maintained that it isn't the form that's going to make the difference. It isn't the rule or the procedure or the ideology, but it's human beings that will make it.
Cesar Chavez
#11. Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.
Hannah Arendt
#12. I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas
John F. Kennedy
#13. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.
Alice Childress
#14. It's the human condition, Kitten. The unknown isn't something that sits well. They'd rather push it away-not completely, but just enough that it's not always shadowing their every thought and action.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#15. The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of law.
Walter Raleigh
#16. Trust life, even if you cannot trust people. For human nature is unreliable, but life itself is ruled by immutable law. Right action leads always, in the end, to victory.
Goswami Kriyananda
#17. Fear has a far greater grasp on human action than the impressive weight of historical evidence.
Jeremy Siegel
#18. Remorse (I did it) is an easy, passive, human reaction, there is no value in it and it changes nothing. Repentance (I will not do it again) is the difficult call to action in a redeemed heart. It has an eternal impact and it can change everything.
William Branks
#19. I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.
Murray Rothbard
#20. The greatest misfortune that can come to a human being is to lose his inner peace. No outer force can rob him of it. It is his own thoughts, his own actions, that rob him of it.
Sri Chinmoy
#22. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action...Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention
Gerard Hauser
#23. The Bhagavad Gita deals essentially with the spiritual foundation of human existence. It is a call of action to meet the obligations and duties of life; yet keeping in view the spiritual nature and grander purpose of the universe.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#24. Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.
Natalia Ginzburg
#25. Every human activity can be put at the service of the divine and of love. We should all exercise our gift to build community.
Jean Vanier
#26. The movies I like to make are very rich and full of passion. Some people see me as an action director, but action is not the only thing in my movies. I always like to show human nature - something deep inside the heart.
John Woo
#27. Ideology follows the money."
"Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.
Lawrence Samuels
#28. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
John Stuart Mill
#29. No honest work of man or woman "fails"; it feeds the sum of all human action.
Michelene Wandor
#30. Every thing in human character goes to wreck, under the reign of procrastination, while prompt action gives to all things a corresponding and proportional life and energy.
William Alcott
#31. But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.
Virginia Woolf
#32. A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
Vaclav Havel
#33. But it is a very difficult thing to change the future.
The slightest turn of phrase ... action and the human soul.
The future changes direction based on those things.
CLAMP
#34. If I ran the world, I would find a way to bring the wealth of human good intentions and corporate good intentions together - to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that produces shared hard, tangible results.
Cindy Gallop
#35. With the tone of the show, like a lot of the films, the Marvel creative team has found a way to bridge really exciting stuff that has real stakes. They balance some of the action stuff that the fans of the comics really want to see with characters that people can relate to and who are very human.
Clark Gregg
#36. All human happiness and misery take the form of action.
Aristotle.
#37. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.
Isaac Asimov
#38. Probably it goes without saying, but time machine guys don't get a lot of action. Had a one night stand with something cute a couple of years ago. Not human exactly. Human-ish. Close enough that she looked awesome without her shirt on.
Charles Yu
#39. Hope may spring eternal in the human breast but it only materializes through action.
Marty Rubin
#40. Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a 'collateral victim' of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other.
Zygmunt Bauman
#41. Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.
Julian Baggini
#42. When it comes to human success, I'm pretty sure the object doesn't need a net external force to move it.
Majid Kazmi
#43. Saint Francis of Assisi understood the power of faith put into action to change the human heart, for it was he who said, "Preach the gospel always; when necessary use words." We had not yet spoken a word in their language, but the village elders had already "heard" the gospel.
Richard Stearns
#44. The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
John Dewey
#45. The idea of, 'The journey is the destination' is put into action by browsing in an indie record store. Besides, a human being is a much better guide than a 'More Like This' link on the internet.
Patton Oswalt
#46. All change requires effort and sacrifice. Sometimes action plans fail because they are based on the idea that there is a 'magic bullet' which on its own can solve our problems.This is not true. Complex human problems typically require complex solutions with many different components.
Alan Carr
#47. The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.
Abraham Lincoln
#48. If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think--to produce--to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness.
Ayn Rand
#49. Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a "nervous system", to coordinate its actions.
Bill Gates
#50. The 20th century peatlands ditching in Finland was the worst human environmental destruction action in Europe.
Pentti Linkola
#51. Action movies to me are dramas with recognizable human beings that are in extraordinary situations.
Walter Hill
#52. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
Mahatma Gandhi
#53. I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.
Jane Goodall
#54. Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become.
James Baldwin
#55. Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone.
Frederick Buell
#56. A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
Thornton Wilder
#58. American business men must learn human nature to the point of accepting as necessary the Rabble Rouser of the Right ... To get fast action somebody must stir millions to genuine anger over conditions which are adversely affecting their lives.
Walter B. Pitkin
#59. 'V-Wars' is a head-on collision of real-world science, terrorism, special forces action, ethics, politics and an exploration of what defines us as human.
Jonathan Maberry
#60. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain
#61. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
Henry Ward Beecher
#62. [On disagreeing with her husband about his slave-holding:] I cannot give my conscience into the keeping of another human being or submit the actions dictated by my conscience to their will.
Fanny Kemble
#63. I feel a moral obligation to speak out at this key moment in human history - it is a moment for action.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#64. We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.
V.S. Pritchett
#65. O admirable necessity! O powerful action! What mind can penetrate your nature? What language can express this marvel? None, to be sure. This is where human discourse turns toward the contemplation of the divine.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#66. Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions.
Madame De Stael
#67. If you want to be a real human being - a real woman, a real man - you cannot tolerate things which put you to indignation, to outrage. You must stand up. I always say to people, 'Look around; look at what makes you unhappy, what makes you furious, and then engage yourself in some action.'
Stephane Hessel
#68. Every one of us, as human beings, even in a committed relationship, has moments and thoughts and actions that, whether or not they share them with their loved one, tells you, as much as anything, about them as people and their relationship.
Jeff Pinkner
#69. The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.
Lev S. Vygotsky
#70. Nature does not rush things, humans do; when we rush things, we often miss the lessons nature embedded in it
Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel
#71. Human myopia cannot be overcome simply by well-meaning attempts to build [climate] models that purport to peer decades and centuries ahead. Action taken now, in anticipation of supposed long run trends, may concentrate on the wrong issues and make matters worse rather than better.
Colin Robinson
#72. We're all capable of anything as human beings. Any emotion, any action. We really are.
Jeff Daniels
#73. The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another.
Mary Lascelles
#74. She's got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It's magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her.
Charlie Brooker
#75. The rainbow mirrors human aims and action. Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing Life is but light in many-hued reflection.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#76. Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
#77. Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.
Ouida
#78. The most amazing mechanism in the known universe is the human brain; it takes in information all the time then uses it, all of which is happening, of course, without human knowledge. Typical ...
Amanda Dubin
#79. There are horrible events going on all over the world. Human beings are really fucking up. Poets, we can't just write poems. We have to put poems into action.
Jeremiah Walton
#80. Either the distances betweem the distant quarters of the globe are diminished, or you have extended the powers of human action.
Hugh Elliot
#81. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts.
Albert Einstein
#82. Courageous leaders face unpleasant and even devastating situations with equanimity, then act firmly to bring good from trouble, even if their action is unpopular. Leadership always faces natural human inertia and opposition. But courage follows through with a task until it is done.
J. Oswald Sanders
#83. In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporarily and logically. What a man considers his interest is the result of his ideas.
Ludwig Von Mises
#84. Every human action, whether it has become positive or negative, must depend on motivation.
Dalai Lama
#85. In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.
Paul Kingsnorth
#86. Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each. Time and action are the teachers.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#87. Each human being was given two possibilities: action and contemplation. Both lead to the same place.
Paulo Coelho
#88. Greatness and Truth can never be in danger from these murdering wretches. To perform one's duty, be it now, be it clean, and be it done with humility ... A man is a sacred thing. ANY ACTION OR THOUGHT WHICH INJURES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS EVIL.
Kenneth Patchen
#89. The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#90. The single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action
Cindy Gallop
#91. A burning desire is the greatest motivator of every human action.
Paul J. Meyer
#92. Any action that arises out of stress is of low quality, and it contributes to human suffering. You are making yourself and others suffer.
Eckhart Tolle
#93. The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice
C. G. Jung
#94. Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.
Leonard Bernstein
#95. Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish - that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that's actually good.
Steven Pressfield
#96. Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#97. When you truly embrace your human impermanence you connect with the power you have, and influence you have, over the time you have.
Steve Maraboli
#98. There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#99. Life in this form is one-time chance, death is the inevitable consequence for anyone who is born. The record of one's death is the primary respect one could render to the lost one. Tears of all relatives of missing people are indeed flowing due to this invaluable action by the authority.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#100. There are three essential factors in all human activity: spirit, materials, and action.
Chiang Kai-shek
