The 50 Best Quotes About Taking Action

I’ve collected thousands of quotes over the past 10+ years.

Here are the best ones I’ve found about taking action, including insights from top thought leaders in entrepreneurship, productivity, philosophy, and habit formation...

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. Clarity doesn’t come before action. It comes from action.” -Rumi

“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.” -Steve Jobs

“Nothing happens until after you commit.” -Dan Sullivan

“Don’t be afraid to act. Be afraid of living a life that seems more like a resume than an adventure.” -Noah Kagan

“In crisis, it’s often only after you take the first step that the path emerges.” -Simone Stolzoff

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” -Leonardo da Vinci

“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.” -Marc Andreessen

"We're taught that you need a publisher to write a book, a studio to make a movie, or a gatekeeper to deem you worthy. But the truth is, the tools to create and share have never been more accessible. The only permission you need is your own." -Austin Kleon

“Many a false step was made by standing still.” -Fortune cookie

“Inspiration unused is merely entertainment. To get new results, you need to take new actions.” -David Bach

“Your entire life can change with one year of focused daily effort.” -Sahil Bloom

“Life rewards action, not intelligence. Unfortunately, the smarter you are, the better the excuses. You can analyze forever, or you can take action.” -Giacomo Falcone

“We are the prison guards of the jail that we’re complaining about.” -Chris Williamson

“Working on a problem reduces the fear of it. It’s hard to fear a problem when you are making progress on it—even if progress is imperfect and slow. Action relieves anxiety.” -James Clear

“I got my start by giving myself a start.” -Madam CJ Walker

"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow…If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure." -Jeff Bezos

“Anxiety feeds on idleness. You’re feeling stuck and anxious because you’re not doing anything. When you take action, you starve the anxiety of the oxygen it needs to survive.” -Sahil Bloom

“Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail.” -Steve Jobs

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” -Paulo Coelho

“I’ve realized that the key to being successful is not how good your ideas are. It’s how good you are at being able to find quick, cheap, and easy ways to try your ideas.” -Marc Randolph

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” -Friedrich Engels

“In a world overflowing with information, the true challenge is not gathering more insights but deciding to take that first, crucial step.” -Pat Flynn

“You are never stuck. That’s a lie you tell yourself. You can leave a job, a relationship, a living situation, a date, an interview, or a conversation anytime you want to.” -Mel Robbins

“There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.” -David Allen

“Whenever you are stuck searching for the optimal plan, remember: Getting started changes everything.” -James Clear

“Actions produce information. If you’re stuck on a problem or a decision, just do anything. If it turns out to be wrong, you can adjust, and you’ll reach the right path much faster than if you wait for certainty.” -Giacomo Falcone

“Even 30 minutes spent actually doing the thing today are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours in the future.” -Oliver Burkeman

“There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.” -Steven Pressfield

“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.” -Jeff Bezos

“Initium est dimidium facti” (Once you’ve started, you’re halfway there.) -Old Latin proverb

“Action expresses priorities.” -Gandhi

“Do one thing every day that scares you.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

“Your business heroes are average people who took a lot of action.” -Justin Welsh

“When you’re coming up, you kind of have this sense that somebody at some point will be like, ‘Now it’s your turn.' And it doesn’t ever happen like that...There’s no man behind the curtain who goes, ‘ok, your turn now.’ You have to make your own turn. You have to will it into existence.” -Greta Gerwig

“Most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.” -Seth Godin

“The wise does at once what the fool does at last.” -Jewish proverb

“Just start. You’re trying to map out the whole nine innings. Just throw the first pitch.” -Ryan Holiday

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” -General George Patton

“At the end of the day we are accountable to ourselves—our success is a result of what we do.” -Catherine Pulsifer

“With movement comes clarity.” -Thaddeus Bradley

"People think they'll do something later. They think they'll have more time in the future than they do today, as if later is a magical time when everything will happen. Forget the whole notion of the future. There is only today. If you want to do something, do it now. If you don't want to do it now, then you don't want to do it at all, so let it go." -Derek Sivers

“Five years from now you will wish you had started today.” -Kevin Kelly

“Lots of people want to be the noun (writer, entrepreneur, etc.) without doing the verb (writing, inventing, etc.).” -Austin Kleon

“Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources.” -Ryan Holiday

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” -George Eliot

“I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing, and I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all.” -Jeff Bezos

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” -Andrew Carnegie

“Better to take a risk, try something, and distill the answer from experience rather than from navel-gazing. Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.” -Chip and Dan Heath

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.” -Henry David Thoreau