Inaction Quotes

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Strenuous Life

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
― Albert Camus

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.”
― Tennesse Williams, Camino Real

“But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“Many times, the thought of fear itself is greater than what it is we fear.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
― Joseph Chilton Pearce

“There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“You are where you are right now because of the actions you've taken, or maybe, the inaction you've taken.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

“When in doubt chicken out.”
― Robin Jones Gunn, Christy Miller Collection, Vol. 2

“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“Rejection is more valuable than inaction. All that I have learned until now has been because of rejections. Inaction didn’t teach me a thing.”
― Neeraj Agnihotri, Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination

“Stagnation is self-abdication.”
― Ryan Talbot

“I have met people who have ruined their entire lives because of procrastination. They were unaware of why they never took a step, but I could easily see their Procrasdemon standing beside them.”
― Neeraj Agnihotri, Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination

“Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.

And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.”
― Steven Erikson

“As long as [man] does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance... Wallow in it... Write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which [Heavenly Father] plants in a human soul... Do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm [the cause of evil] if [it is kept] out of his will... The more often he feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“There was a certain wisdom in doing little, when one was obliged to act in ignorance.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Fortress of Eagles

“Tolerance never exists without negative judgment. It is the sentiment of having a negative opinion about something yet still putting up with it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Yesterday I was stupid, so I wanted to change the world. Today, I am more stupid, so I am changing the world. And tomorrow there will be a hundred more stupid like me, for this stupidity for changing the world can never accept any excuse for inaction, even if that excuse happens to be a most rational reason.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law

“Hope means to take charge,
Hope means unsubmission.
Hope means to not lose sight,
Hope means to cause illumination.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Mastery is a journey, and mastery without progress is impossible. So it follows that: inaction is the enemy of greatness.”
― Jen Fraser, CopyCat: How to Escape Status Quo Thinking and Lead the Field

“If the moderates of the white South fail to act now, history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people, Our generation will have to repent not only for the acts and words of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story