Quotes
Quotes about Action
The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.
The materials of action are variable, but the use we make of them should be constant.
Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by correspondent actions,--as the habit of walking, by walking; of running, by running.
Solon used to say that speech was the image of actions;... that laws were like cobwebs,--for that if any trifling or powerless thing fell into them, they held it fast; while if it were something weightier, it broke through them and was off.
There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
We are moved by music in ways that words cannot describe, and such emotion can drive us to action - war, murder, love.
Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of action on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temparament with which you have endowed them
The difference between the so-called art novel and the popular variety is perhaps that in the first the human beings are more important than the action and in the second it is the other way about
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
I have had a lifelong difficulty in accepting physical laws. Aeroplanes fly, and I have read all the books which explain aerodynamics, but, flying, I have sometimes been fearful of the sudden exposure of the science of flight as untenable and, with a kind of satisfaction, of hearing the pilot announce that we were falling.
Anthony Burgess A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults. The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
There are half-invented people and half-conceived actions in my brain and these have to be completed and released into novels for the sake of my own comfort
There is probably no greater happiness in this world than that derived from writing, in a void, for pure pleasure - to see whether places and people, speech and action, can be fixed on paper and then, like a lesser divine creation, rise from that paper and live
... he sighed, knowing himself to be caught forever between worlds - earth and air, reason and belief, action and contemplation. Alone among all sorts of men, he embraced a poet's martyrdom
Literature is an epiphenomenon of the action of the flesh
So many of our troubles spring from nature, not from the actions of men. Or women
Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding human satisfactions
A lethal action, smoking. Smoking makes the life shorter
The thing is to sow the ideas widely. Then when the time comes for turning them into action the world of the believer will be ready
I had no desire to go home again, but I could import temporary fractions of my home to wherever I was
I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias. It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something, too, of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality
You cannot make moral judgements on things, only on actions
Action was what was missing from the original novel, and this had to be coldly injected, like adrenalin
And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in SAYING this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest--and see what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.
It may be that love turned to hate is terribly common in sexual matters: it may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of race or class. But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns.
