A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.
Interpretation
Action is essential for success; overthinking can hinder progress.
This quote emphasizes the necessity of taking action in order to achieve results. It suggests that waiting for perfect conditions or over-analyzing situations can prevent a person from being effective, and that just as breathing is a natural action, so should be our propensity to act without hesitation in pursuit of our goals.
In practice
During a motivational speech to encourage employees to take initiative.
Monet's garden must be included with his works, because he combined the magic of an adaptation of nature with the work of a painter of light. An extension of the studio into the openair, with color tones lavishly spread out on all sides to exercise the eye with seductive vibrations, from which a feverishly aroused retina expects unquenchable joy.
I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war.
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves he isn't a man of action.
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. You must act as you breathe.
Don't quit. Never give up trying to build the world you can see, even if others can't see it. Listen to your drum and your drum only. It's the one that makes the sweetest sound.
I'm not doing the run to become rich or famous.
Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a formerly grand vaudeville theater, a dance marathon limps along. The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to bite back at the dreams sold to them in newspaper advertisements and on the radio. They have sores on their feet but stars in their eyes.
Humans are built for endurance, not speed. We're awful sprinters compared to every other animal. We try to run our races as if they were speed races, but they are not. They're endurance races. Even a marathon, the way it's run now, it's not an endurance contest.
Please don’t get hung up on this question of whether you need to have experience in an industry before you launch your startup.
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