"Man of action" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leave much to chance? That irresistible passion for authority which Napoleon had is lacking in these others. Their basal inspiration seems to resemble the impulse of the artist to express, rather than the impulse of the man of action to possess. Had it not been for secession, Lee would probably have ended his days as an exemplary superintendent of West Point. And what of Lincoln? He dabbled in politics, early and without success; he left politics for the law, and to the law he gave during many years his chief devotion. ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... theory of biological evolution may with some justice be described as "the happy accident theory." The man of high individuality, then, the exceptional man, the man of genius, be he man of thought, man of feeling, or man of action, is no accident that can be overlooked by history. On the contrary, he is in no small part the history-maker; and, as such, should be treated with due respect by the history-compiler. The "dry bones" of history, its statistical averages, and so on, are all very well ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... our visitors descend the stair and the bang of the front door. In an instant Holmes had changed from the languid dreamer to the man of action. ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... a man of action. He screwed up his weather-eye (the one next his wife, of course, that being the quarter from which squalls might be expected). and began a yarn which lasted the better ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... lover. D'Arthez is one of those privileged beings in whom shrewdness of mind and a broad expanse of the qualities of the brain do not exclude either the strength or the grandeur of sentiments. He is, by rare privilege, equally a man of action and a man of thought. His private life is noble and generous. If he carefully avoided love, it was because he knew himself, and felt a premonition of the empire such a ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... newspaper and cigarette. He was essentially a man of action. He had been on his feet all day, hurrying hither and thither over his widespread parish, interfering in this man's business and that woman's quarrels with that hastiness which usually characterizes the ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... a man of action. He bled me because I had not the strength to strangle him, and poured decoctions of boiled grass down my throat because I could not speak. He has fantastic ideas about ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... in the character of his intellect; there he fell a thousand leagues below my mother, to whom he looked up with affectionate astonishment. But, as a man of action, he ran so far ahead of men generally, that he ceased to impress one as commonplace. He, if any man ever did, realized the Roman poet's description of being natus rebus agendis—sent into this world not for talking, but for doing; not for counsel, but for execution. On that field he ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... still have been the keeper of God's Presence on earth. I see the Spear as humanity's weakness, which, by being turned to strength, becomes a spear of Deliverance. Ingenious, isn't it? You'll say 'More dreams, Marcella?' But they're not dreams, doctor, any more. I'm a man of action ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... judge," he answered stoutly. "As for me, I am very glad you do me this honor. I but seek the best plan of service, Mademoiselle, for I stand between you and this sacrifice with much pleasure. You shall not marry Cassion while I wear a sword; yet, faith! I am so much a man of action that I see no way out but by the strong arm. Is appeal to the Governor, ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... group the great prose master, Walter Scott. Mr. Gladstone said he thought Scott the greatest of his countrymen. John Morley suggested John Knox instead. Mr. Gladstone replied: "No, the line must be drawn firmly between the writer and the man of action—no comparison there."[1] He went on to say that Burns is very fine and true, no doubt, "but to imagine a whole group of characters, to marshal them, to set them to work, and to sustain the action, I must count that the test of highest and most diversified ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... morning, being a man of action as well as of word, I started my "Artistic Joke." I was determined to keep the matter secret, so I worked with my studio doors closed, and as each picture was finished it was placed behind some heavy curtains, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the man of action, always hopeful to the very last, was still attempting to muster what troops he might for a last effort, when at the corner of a street he unexpectedly was faced by a detachment of the enemy's cavalry. The commanding officer drew a revolver and shot him, the bullet entering ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... men of markedly contrasted types—the one all fire, restlessness, energy; the other calm, contemplative, intensely spiritual. Both were alike filled with a deep faith, a deep zeal; one the man of action, the other the man of meditation and devotion—yet deeply attached one to the other, as could be seen by the way they ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was not easy. And when things were not easy to him, Bill's temper invariably suffered. Besides, scheming was never pleasant to him. He was so essentially a man of action. An open battle appealed to him as nothing else in the world appealed to him. Force of arms—that was his conception of the settlement of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... in these last years he was forced, more than was agreeable to him, to play the role of an intelligent commentator, remained a man of action to the end. He sought, this time in vain, to extract from the French government wages still due the crew of the old Bonhomme Richard. His failure brought out an unusually bitter letter, in which he again recounted his services and the wrongs done him by the various ministers of marine. ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... the pen of a romancer I might enlarge on this sensational theme. But I am a man of action, whose business it is to record facts, not ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... though to find out whether his remark was meant seriously or whether he might venture to be cynical. Elsmere writing! Why should everybody write books? It was absurd! The scholar who knows what toll scholarship takes of life is always apt to resent the intrusion of the man of action into his domains. It looks to him like a kind of ridiculous assumption that any one d'un coeur leger can do what has ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Freeman is a man of action. He likes to see people running about. When he appears upon the horizon whole battalions ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... had achieved. The way to India was indeed open, but no one seems to have had sufficient fortitude to undertake so long a voyage in order to reach it by that route. Dom Manoel had, however, but one idea. He was not a geographer like his predecessor, Joao, "the perfect," but he was a man of action, and determined that the route Prince Henry's navigators had opened to India should not remain unused. Vasco da Gama was then in his thirty-fifth year, the handsomest man of his age, of ancient family, and it is claimed was not without royal blood in his veins. As a soldier he was trained ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... lustre to that of King James, had not his Sowship—to employ the title bestowed upon that prince by his own queen—been too mean of soul to appreciate the man's great worth. Courtier, philosopher, soldier, man of letters and man of action alike, Ralegh was at once the greatest prose-writer, and one of the greatest captains of his age, the last survivor of that glorious company—whose other members were Drake and Frobisher and Hawkins—that had given England supremacy upon ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... whispers grew fainter in his ears. And by the time he had retraced his cautious steps back to the orchard all his physical being was strung to the task at hand. Something had come between his reflective self and this man of action. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... touching it; at least two of them suffered, revolted, and condemned, while still boys sitting on benches in school, and came forth advancing upon this old society like gladiators. The activity of William Lloyd Garrison, the man of action, preceded by several years that of Emerson, who is his prophet. Both of them were parts of one revolution. One of Emerson's articles of faith was that a man's thoughts spring from his actions rather than his actions from his thoughts, and possibly ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... III. found himself master of Mexico, he looked around for a man who would serve him as a tool to hold the country. Such a man he found in Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian, the brother of the emperor of Austria, a dreamer rather than a man of action, and a fervent believer in the "divine right of kings." This was the kind of man that the French usurper was in want of, and he offered him the position of emperor of Mexico. Maximilian was taken by ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... read once of curious old-time beings called knights, who had undertaken to fight and slay fire-eating things called dragons for the sake of an almost outmoded emotion referred to as love. It occurred to him that this brusque man of action might be compared to just such a being. He was undertaking to slay a dragon and win a castle for the daughter ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... Being a man of action, Mr. Crow began operations at once. He went home and for nearly an hour worked over the list of subscribers to the fund, aided by his wife and daughters. Among them they separated the wheat from the chaff. At least twenty ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... in both Houses. With WINSOME WINSTON in the Commons and JACK FISHER in the Lords, the Navy will have a good show. Only doubt is whether FIRST SEA LORD will think it worth while to devote to Parliamentary duties the measure of time exacted from FIRST LORD OF ADMIRALTY. Essentially a man of action, he has little patience with custom of talking round a matter. Nevertheless well to know that, if occasion serve, he can make a speech far beyond average in respect of power and originality. Discovery made when, six or seven years ago, he fluttered the decorous dovecotes of the Royal Academy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... broken. Marcel promptly became the man of action. He pointed at the gnarled and broken head of a stunted tree growing at the very edge of the canyon, with its battered crest reaching out at a perilous angle over ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... himself on July 31, what he has invariably shown himself since, an incomparable man over the top, fearless and ruthless, ever where the fight is hottest and always ready to display his individual initiative on all possible and impossible occasions, a born man of action to whom long experience of shot and shell has made the art of modern war a second nature—an officer after Best-Dunkley's own heart: the Military Cross was the least form of recognition which could reward such an achievement as his. The bright and chivalrous ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... Infernal Marriage, and Popanilla. These works had gained for him a brilliant, if not universally admitted, place in literature. But his ambition was by no means confined to literary achievement; he aimed also at fame as a man of action. After various unsuccessful attempts to enter Parliament, in which he stood, first as a Radical, and then as a Tory, he was in 1837 returned for Maidstone, having for his colleague Mr. Wyndham Lewis, whose ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the boldest of his followers in acts of daring: indeed he lost his life at Chios by being the first to run his ship on shore and to try to effect a landing in the face of the enemy. Phokion, who was a man of action, and cautious nevertheless, proved most useful in stirring up Chabrias when sluggish, and again in moderating his eagerness when roused. In consequence of this, Chabrias, who was of a kindly and noble disposition, loved Phokion and promoted ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I have been priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was I in observing the moving drama beneath me that for the moment I failed to glimpse the tragedy ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the latter. Such a performance entails no hardship or difficulty worth heeding. Its value depends purely on observation, not on action. The man does little; he merely records what he sees. He is only the man of the beaten routes. The true wilderness wanderer, on the contrary, must be a man of action as well as of observation. He must have the heart and the body to do and to endure, no less than the eye to see and the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... master, and the restoration would have been in favour of the old regime, not of the constitutional monarchy. On one point only the two advisers agreed: Breteuil, like Mirabeau, recommended Bouille as the man of action. His reply was brought by the Bishop of Pamiers, an eighteenth-century prelate of the worldly sort, who was afterwards selected to be the minister of finance if Brunswick had conquered. On October 23 the bishop was sent to Metz ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Petain, the protege of De Castelnau, who commanded at Verdun—a tall, square-built man, not un-English in his appearance, with grizzled hair and the sober face of a thinker. But his mouth and jaw are those of a man of action, and the look in his gray eyes is always changing. Now it is speculative and analytic, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... intellectuality, meant wisdom in the first instance and placed knowledge only in a very subordinate place. The tripod that supported the framework of Bushido was said to be Chi, Jin, Yu, respectively Wisdom, Benevolence, and Courage. A samurai was essentially a man of action. Science was without the pale of his activity. He took advantage of it in so far as it concerned his profession of arms. Religion and theology were relegated to the priests; he concerned himself with them in so far as they helped to nourish courage. Like an English ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... demand had a pronounced effect upon Charlie. The air of the suppliant fell from him, even the signs of his recent debauch seemed to give way before a startling alertness of mentality. In his curious way he seemed suddenly to have become the man of action, full of a keenness of perception and shrewdness which might well have carried an added conviction to Stanley Fyles, had he witnessed ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... of academic bachelor had this significance, the man of action passed it by. It had no meaning to him, and the fine edge of accuracy in thought and perception, which only the college can give, was wanting in his work. The college education did not seem to disclose the secret of power, ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... point. All who were brought in contact with Lyall speedily recognised his social charm and high intellectual gifts, but was he a man of action? Did he possess the qualifications necessary to those who take part in the government of the outlying dominions of the Empire? I have often been asked that question. It is one to which Sir Mortimer Durand frequently reverts, his general conclusion being that Lyall was "a man of action with ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Oftentimes waiting is vain, without accompaniment of hard work. The Sirdar made deliberate choice to carve out a career in Egypt. He did so in the dark days when the outlook was the reverse of promising, in nearly every aspect, to a man of action. Abdication of our task of reconstruction was in the air, the withdrawal of the British army of occupation a much-talked-of calamity. Through every phase of the situation, Kitchener stuck to his guns, keeping ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... men who had attended this strange Parliament of unpractical enthusiasts, there was a Prussian country squire by the name of Bismarck, who had made good use of his eyes and ears. He had a deep contempt for oratory. He knew (what every man of action has always known) that nothing is ever accomplished by talk. In his own way he was a sincere patriot. He had been trained in the old school of diplomacy and he could outlie his opponents just as he could outwalk them and outdrink ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... which Lane had no tolerance. Moreover, the quiet little man, with his dull eyes, who moved about as if his faculties had been forgotten in the morning when he got up, who could sit for hours dawdling at the piano striking chords, or staring at the keys, seemed merely queer to the man of action. "I wish he would do something," Isabelle had said of Vickers, using his own words of her, and her husband had replied, "Do? ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... knocked down a pheasant or two. I was an odd mixture—half a man of action, half a man of dreams. My position in Cashel was unbearable. My mother was a lady; my father—you know how he had let himself down. You cannot imagine the yearnings of a poor boy; you were brought up in all elegance ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... contempt of literature as a subject of education. The good citizen or man of the world—in the best sense of the phrase—must not be the slave of literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or husband or friend or man of action and affairs. The world of letters, if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the actual world is almost meaningless. Now the genus irritabile vatum, even when their thoughts, as Carlyle ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... That would have resulted in the disinclination of people in this country to send what is of so much importance [i.e., their cargoes to Nueva Espana], with the supplies and artillery which I sent—very differently from the usual practice, in charge of a man of action and valor, who has fought very often. I cannot see why the viceroy should wonder at a thoroughly satisfactory person being appointed and sent from here, in order to return in such a post, since ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... meaningless to him, which they introduced into Judaism. His object was to remove the petrified rabbinical restrictions (gezerot) and develop the emotional side of the Jew in their stead. He was primarily a man of action, and had little love for the rabbis, their passivity, world-weariness, and pride of intellect. It is said that when he "overheard the sounds of eager, loud discussions issuing from a rabbinical college, closing ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... at him, and something in the look almost spiked the big gun. But Epstein was a man of action, and, notwithstanding his nervousness, a man of some nerve. The expression in the boy's black eyes had stunned him, but with only an instant's hesitation he finished what he had meant ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... now," she said. "I no longer care for moving about. This old town house of mine has become to me like my shell. I'm lazy, Beryl; I'm lazy. You don't know what that is; nor do you, Mr. Craven. Even you, Seymour, you don't know. For you are a man of action, and at Court there is always movement. But I, my friends—" She gave Craven a deliciously kind yet impersonal smile. "I am a contemplative. There is nothing oriental about me, but I am just a quiet British contemplative, untouched by ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Klinger (1752-1831) was a fellow-townsman and friend of Goethe. His Sturm und Drang, which was at first named Wirrwarr, came out in 1776. The scene is 'America.' The speakers are Wild, a lusty and masterful man of action; Blasius, a blas worldling; and La Feu, a sentimental dreamer. They propose to try their fortunes in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... countenance to read and understand. If, for a moment, the neatness and precision of his dress suggested a man of idle leisure, a courtier and little more, there quickly followed a conviction that such an estimate of his character was a wrong one. Dreamer he might be, in a sense, but he was also a man of action. The spare frame was full of energy, there was determination in the face. This was a man who knew nothing of fear, whom danger would only bring stronger courage; a man who would press forward to his goal undaunted by ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... delighted with his uncle and cousin than they with him. Always and necessarily a student and observer rather than a man of action, he felt an instant sympathy with the man and woman of books and thought. He loved dearly his own family, active, strenuous people, overflowing with strength and energy; but he often felt himself out of place among them, and reproached himself with the frequent languor and ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... perhaps (from an advanced European point of view), indicative of a little intellectual immaturity; but they are thoroughly characteristic of the Scandinavian nationalities. The love of brave words and brave deeds, the exaltation of the man of action above the man of thought, the pleasure in reckless gallantry and foolhardy adventure, are, however, not confined to Swedes and Norwegians, but are characteristic of the boyhood of every nation. In the Scotchman, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the letter and looked expectantly at the Secretary of State, who returned the look with one of utter dismay. Never in all his career had the diplomat been so completely dumbfounded as he was now by the simple directness of the man of action. In himself Dom Miguel Forjas was both shrewd and honest. He was shrewd enough to apprehend to the full the military genius of the British Commander-in-Chief, fruits of which he had already witnessed. He knew that the withdrawal ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... the genius of the Scandinavian race was Tegner. His love of brave deeds and reckless adventure and his exaltation of the man of action above the man of thought are typical. His heroes, fair-haired and blue-eyed, stalwart and vigorous, relying on strength and longing for adventure, tender-hearted and contemplative when not aroused to violent action and bent on deeds of valor, personify the national ideal. His whole ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... is assumed to be the same kind of thing. A qualitative difference exists when some quality or trait possessed by one individual is lacking in the other. Thus, "Tom knows German, Dick does not"; "A is artistic, B is scientific"; "C is a man of thought, D is a man of action"; are reports of the fact that Tom has some positive amount or degree of the trait "knowledge of German" while Dick has none of it; that A has some positive amount of ability and interest in art while B has zero; whereas B has a positive amount of ability in science, of which ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a man of action. As soon as his sister retired to her own room, he followed, and then and there fully opened his heart to her. He told her all, from the first moment when Barbara began to monopolize his thoughts, and confessed his struggles ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... of a type that in the early days helped to build up the Church and give her stability. His nature must have been curiously complex; on the one hand, a man of action and with great capability of administration, often justifying his means by the end he had in view, and not being debarred from realising his schemes by any delicate scruples, he yet, on the other hand, presents in his letters a chastened spirituality that is not compatible ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... Guerre, Clemenceau was Premier, and upon the latter fell the task of choosing an officer for the important Directorship. There was keen competition for the position, many influential Generals desiring the appointment, and in consequence much wire-pulling went on. The story goes that Clemenceau, a man of action, became impatient of the intrigues for the post, and determined to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of Tarentum' the younger brother, Guido, is, again, the man of action; a miles gloriosus who boasts of his strong arm and dreams of glory. He looks with contempt and hatred upon his gentle, sentimental brother Julius, who, though heir to the throne, prepares to renounce his career because he is thwarted in love. The girl Blanca, upon whom he has fixed ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... youthful contours, was deep-lined and melancholy. He was short of stature and slenderly though gracefully built, and his black curls clustered over brow and eyes that seemed rather those of a poet or a dreamer than of a man of action. In the sombre, dark blue garments of mourning, without ornaments or jewels, so different from the gay banqueting robes in which she had last seen him, Marcia gazed a moment, before she recognized ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... before he expected it; but luckily Herrick was a man of action and grappled with the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the great towns were at his back, and he knew—in spite of all appearances to the contrary—that they, though yet unrepresented, were in reality stronger than all the forces of selfish privilege and senseless prejudice. Lord John had proved himself to be a man of action. The nation was beginning to dream that he would yet prove himself to be a ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... uses the appellation, "our own Ennius," when he quotes his poetry. Horace calls him "Father Ennius," a term which implies reverence and regard, and that he was the founder of Latin poetry. He was, like his friends Cato the censor, and Scipio Africanus the elder, a man of action as well as philosophical thought, and not only a poet, but a brave soldier, with all the singleness of heart and simplicity of manners which marked the old times of Roman virtue. Ennius possessed great power over words, and wielded that power skillfully. He improved ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... a man of action and few words: he vouchsafed no reply, but turned immediately and left the room, leaving a powerful odour of ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... Emotionally it was complex to be actor and audience both. Thank God, he reflected, as he opened a closet door, dragged forth a battered multitude of bags and suit cases and began an impatient upheaval of bureau drawers, he was a man of action. When Garry entered a half hour later he found the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... shied away from the essential point and Erics went relentlessly on. "As the years passed more repairs were made—first a new set of oars, then some more planks, still newer oars, still more planks. Eventually Achilles, an unthinking man of action who still tried to be aware of what happened to the instruments of action he needed most, realized that not one splinter of the original ship remained. Was this, then, a new ship? At first he was inclined to say yes. But this only evoked the further question: when ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... subjects for meditation and imitation than the prayers and intercessions of the great Apostle. He was a man of action because he was first and foremost a man of prayer. To him both aspects of the well-known motto were true: "To pray is to labour," and ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... last observation we may imagine that there was not a little truth. Poet and novelist as Hawthorne was, sceptic and dreamer and little of a man of action, late-coming fruit of a tree which might seem to have lost the power to bloom, he was morally, in an appreciative degree, a chip of the old block. His forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for conscience' ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... There was nothing to be gained by a struggle in this position, and he knew that the Servian would not risk losing him in the effort to summon the odd pair who were bent over their papers at the top of the house. The Servian was evidently a man of action. ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... was spent by Francis chiefly in fixing his thought by writing. Until now he had been too much the man of action to have been able to give much thought to anything but the living word, but from this time his exhausted forces compelled him to satisfy his longing for souls by some other means than evangelizing tours. We have seen that the chapter of September 29, 1220, on one side, and the bull ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Convent' of Saint Francis of Cheylas a tall, lean man with an ascetic face, prominent cheekbones, and a nose not unlike Garnache's own—the nose of a man of action rather than of prayer—bowed gravely to this stalwart stranger, and in courteous accents begged to be informed in what he might ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... by some deep feeling, they darkened and seemed to draw back in his head. His face was narrow and weathered and thin-cheeked, with a clean-cut jaw, small ears, hair darker than the moustache, but touched at the side wings with grey—the face of a man of action, self-reliant, resourceful. And his bearing was that of one who has always been a bit of a dandy, and paid attention to "form," yet been conscious sometimes that there were things beyond. A man, who, preserving all the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Haldane!" cried Stoddart, who was a man of action if ever there was one. "The cylinder is all right again and will bear any pressure now, and I tell you what it is, the old barquey shall steam along in pursuit of those demons faster than she ever went in her life since ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... complaints made by him in his exile had had no effect of estranging his friend; and we learn from them his real, innermost thoughts, as they are not given even to his brother—as thoughts have surely seldom been confided by one man of action to another. Atticus had complained that he had not been allowed to see a certain letter which Cicero had written to Caesar. This he had called a [Greek: palinodia], or recantation, and it had been addressed to Caesar with the view of professing a withdrawal to some extent ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... qualities. He read widely and loved letters. He was a student of philosophy and religion, a thinker, and, best of all, a man of ideals—"the glory of youth," as he called them in his valedictory oration. But he was something still better and finer than a mere idealist; he was a man of action, eager to put his ideals into practice and bring them to the test of daily life. With his mind full of plans for raising the condition of workingmen while he made his own career, he entered the iron mills of the Ames Company, at Chicopee. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... is no way of circumventing the dreamer so subtle as to flatter his business qualities. We all like to be praised for the something we cannot do. It is for this reason that Mr. Stevenson interferes with Samoan politics, when he should be writing romances—just the desire of the dreamer to play the man of action. ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... to the window, and Martin followed. The purposeful hunchback was a stimulating surprise, a far cry from the eloquent Little Billy of the fire hydrant to the energetic Little Billy of the moment! The man of words become the man of action. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... at the time of his lamented passing, and have appeared since. His character and his qualifications as man of action and elaborator had not always been appraised quite correctly during his lifetime, and they are a subject of differences of opinion still. Often was he spoken of as a great organizer and administrator. But ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... into which Milton could not even in imagination enter, that of the intellectual sensualist who dreams his life away and cannot act. Milton was a man of action and character, and his Melancholy, quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his own Comus, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... importance in his success. They characterize him historically, like the tear which always trembles under the left eyelid of Prince Bismarck, like the gray overcoat of Bonaparte, the black tights and gloomy looks of Hamlet the Dane, or Richelieu's kitten. Lord Mavourneen is a man of action, but he can wait. When he came to Constantinople the Turks thought they could keep him waiting, but they have discovered that they are more generally kept waiting themselves, while his excellency ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... time could change, and which remained implanted on it unalterably to the last. This was the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books, and so much of a man of action and business in the world. Light and motion flashed from every part of it. It was as if made of steel, was said of it, four or five years after the time to which I am referring, by a most original and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... However, Mr. Salter, a man of action, had no time to spare for contemplation, and briskly hustled the stranger into a waiting taxi—for the old days of the rattling, shattered gharry ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... So is he chorister. At four o'clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy and gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife, he has no time to be jealous: he is a man of action rather than of sentiment. His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter; their bright eyes storm the customers; he expands in the midst of all the finery, the lace and muslin kerchiefs, that their cunning hands have wrought. Or, again, more often still, before his dinner ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... once more a man of action. He rose, and bathed, and walked rapidly to and fro upon the sands, working himself up to a daring enterprise. He took his saw into the jungle, and cut down a tree of a kind common enough there. It was wonderfully ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... "with the broken lumber of men's other tools, in the chamber of their son's forgetfulness. Your man of action lasts but for an hour; the man of ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers. Iris woke up, of her own accord, before I had made up my mind what I was going ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... in his mind freely and without fear of betrayal concerning the war that was soon to be waged between the rival factions of our oppressors and the means that were to be used to turn their strife to our own account, and this he did, speaking in fluent Spanish and in short, clear sentences, as a man of action ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... find that the worship of false gods, bowing "down to wood and stone," bulks larger in the mind of the hymn-writer than in the mind of the savage. We look for temples to heathen idols; we find dancing-places and ritual dances. The savage is a man of action. Instead of asking a god to do what he wants done, he does it or tries to do it himself; instead of prayers he utters spells. In a word, he practises magic, and above all he is strenuously and frequently engaged in dancing ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... in the world, (without regarding the acts of former life), are dull and inert like the body itself. For all this, however, a person should act. This is the conclusion of Manu himself. The person that doth not act, certainly succumbeth, O Yudhishthira. The man of action in this world generally meeteth with success. The idle, however, never achieveth success. If success, becometh impossible, then should one seek to remove the difficulties that bar his way to success. And, O king, if a person worketh (hard), ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a very peculiar combination of the two. He was a dreamer, but he never dreamed merely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed to translate his dreams into acts. The practical side of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... may well be surprising over there, for if we had been told the facts of this life before we entered it, we should never have believed it." In its larger issues this happy life to come consists in the development of those gifts which we possess. There is action for the man of action, intellectual work for the thinker, artistic, literary, dramatic and religious for those whose God-given powers lie that way. What we have both in brain and character we carry over with us. No man is too old to learn, for what he learns he keeps. There is ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... or else had noted where it had turned off and had come up the trail in a purely investigative spirit. However that might be, he had not let the chance slip. Which was characteristic of Sheriff O'Malley, essentially a man of action. ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... editor—a man of action—paused for an instant only. Then seizing his bag, he said promptly: "Thank you," and followed his newly-found friend to the ground. The whip cracked, the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... timorous by nature, but capable of outbreaks of audacity as timid persons often are: a gentle and lovable man, but lacking in that robust self-confidence needed by one who would take a resolutely independent line; a man intended to be a student and forced by an unkind fate to assume the role of a man of action. Such a character, brought under the direct influence of a powerful will and a magnetic personality, is readily led to see everything as it is desired that he should see it, and at the worst to differ from the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... lean, hard-bitten men with smouldering eyes and a brick-red complexion. He looked what he was, the man of action and enterprise. He had the wiry frame and strong jaw without which no explorer is complete, and Mortimer, beside him, seemed but a poor, soft product of our hot-house civilization. Mortimer, I forgot to say, wore glasses; and, if ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... name," as it is called. And making a name, the forming of a centre of suggestive influence working, not through essential worth but through idle sound, - this is in conflict with a contemplative nature and a lover of reality as I am. The man of action will make a name, he will work for it unashamed, he finds unadulterated pleasure in being honored and celebrated and renowned. For in his capacity the power of a name, a personality, is indispensable. Wisely he has been equipped with the suitable ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... repeated Archibald. "And a very great poet, I venture to assert, he will be one of these fine days. Naturally he is not a man of action—he is a dreamer. But when I wanted Kate I wasn't satisfied just to go on dreaming about her—ha! ha! Now if my boy would only stop dreaming and just get married instead, I'd settle as much on them as ever they'd want. You see, a genius like my son," ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... and dreamed at the water's edge, was in his eighteenth year or thereabouts, slenderly proportioned, and with well-cut features. The delicately moulded chin, the sensitive nostril—these are the signs of the poet, the dreamer, rather than of the man of action. And yet the face was not altogether deficient in indications of strength. That heavy line of eyebrow should mean something, as also the free up-fling of the head when he sat erect; the final impression was of immaturity of character rather than of the lack of it. From the merely superficial ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the man of action as opposed to nervous cogitation, braced up on the instant like taut wire. What, for heaven's sake, could that be? What a terrible cry! Sohlberg the artist, responding like a chameleon to the various emotional complexions ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the window with his heavy sack loaded to the brim, interrupted their low laughter. He was no talker, but a man of action. Busily all this time he had been gathering up the loose, stray fragments that floated off from the cloud, and stuffing them into the sack. He now flew, singing, into the night, and they barely caught the last words of ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Bastard, the fiery, lean, impatient mask of Hotspur, and the cynical, bold eyes of Richard III. Even if it were admitted that Shakespeare preferred the type of the poet-philosopher, he was certainly able, one would say, to depict the man of action with extraordinary vigour and success. He himself then must have possessed a certain strength of character, certain qualities of decision and courage; he must have had, at least, "a good stroke in him," as Carlyle phrased it. This is the universal belief, a belief sanctioned by Coleridge ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the list; one only and the best—the most endeared of them all—Dr. Heugh. He was, in mental constitution and temper, perhaps more unlike my father than any of the others I have mentioned. His was essentially a practical understanding; he was a man of action, a man for men more than for man, the curious reverse in this of my father. He delighted in public life, had a native turn for affairs, for all that society needs and demands,—clear-headed, ready, intrepid, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... was a man of action, not a scholar; and the errors of which his writings are full may well be overlooked, so full of interest is what he says. The selections above have been slightly changed, principally, however, in spelling and the use ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... been making good use of his morning!" he said at dinner. "He has already proposed to Miss Wylder and been accepted! Richard is a man of action—a ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... you,' I began, when Buck, ever the man of action, with a scorn of palaver, strode past me, and, having prodded with the pistol that part of the bedclothes beneath which a rough calculation suggested that Mr Abney's lower ribs were concealed, uttered the ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... an attitude dangerous, perhaps disastrous, to his purposes, was now dead; and the office which that man held had become vacant. There was but one individual left in the tribe who might yet prove a stumbling-block to him; that was the Hishtanyi Chayan. But the great medicine-man was not so much a man of action as a man of words, and the force of his oracular utterances Tyope hoped to destroy through the powerful speeches of the Koshare Naua and the strong medicine of the Shkuy Chayan. The plans of Tyope had been immensely furthered by the terrible accident; ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... insouciance, and would break off an important discussion of the Council from indifference, incompetence, or impatience, to go off hunting. Worst of all, for an autocrat, he had not in his nature one particle of those qualities that go to make up the man of action, decision, energy, courage, whole-heartedness. In this he represented the decay of his race, surfeited with power, victim of the system it {36} had struggled so long and so hard to establish. At the best he had flashes of common sense, which, unfortunately for himself, he was never capable ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... seems to be without a flaw. But what then? We applaud the Man of Logic, but what of the Man of Action? What are you going to ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... said was run by "that traitor Northcliffe." It was all very interesting to us, who hoped against hope that the man who to our perspective was the one great man of vision would be given the opportunity to become the man of action. ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for its part, what they hate—the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of cranks: the race has never been common ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... answered the Independent; "and I trust he has seen the error of his ways, and made himself (as, if a man of action, he easily might) fit for better company than wood-hunters, deer-stealers, Maid Marions, swash-bucklers, deboshed revellers, bloody brawlers, maskers, and mummers, lewd men and light women, fools and fiddlers, and ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... against "In the Shadow of the Glen" had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, he illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... critical eyes. She saw a clean-shaven face, brown, handsome and eager, merry blue eyes, a chin firm and aggressive, a mischievous mouth, a forehead which showed the man of thought, a slim athletic form which showed the man of action—all of which combined to produce that indescribable air which ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... was a man of action, to whom the purlieus of a caravansary were well enough on rare occasions. He could ruffle it with the best of them; like any of his race, he could lounge with dignity and listen to the tales that hum wherever many horsemen congregate; and he was no mean raconteur—he had ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... it," said Ned. The boy's heart was pounding. Somehow he felt that an event of great importance was at hand, and he was glad to have a share in it. But the three spoke little. The Panther led the way. Ned saw that despite his boasting words he was a man of action. Certainly he was acting swiftly now, and it was quite evident that he knew what he was doing. At last he turned to Ned ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he and Zac had seen very much of one another, on sea and on shore. The other passenger was a Roman Catholic priest, whose look and accent proclaimed him to be a Frenchman. He seemed about fifty years of age, and his bronzed faced, grizzled hair, and deeply-wrinkled brow, all showed the man of action rather than the recluse. Between these two passengers there was the widest possible difference. The one was almost a boy, the other a world-worn old man; the one full of life and vivacity, the other sombre and abstracted; ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... "Being a man of action, uncle George was never much of a talker, as you know—but he is more silent than ever these days. In London he would sit all day long in a dreadful apathy, and all night long I would hear him go tramping, tramping to and fro ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... against the huge and silent approach of the Servile State, using Socialists and Anti-Socialists alike as its tools; and third, his recent campaign of public education in military affairs. In all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety, and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs to the most individually prudent ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... moments, which were rare, he was given to railing against the fate which had made him a round peg in a square hole; a technical engineer and a man of action, when his earlier tastes and inclinations had drawn him in other directions. But the temperamental qualities; the niceties, the exactness, the thoroughness, which, finding no outlet in an artistic calling, had made him a master in his unchosen profession, were well known to Mr. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... to reply to such a question. He recalled with antipathy his bourgeois existence over there in Barcelona, before buying the steamer. He was a man of action and could live only when occupied in ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and logic that has forced the most dry-as-dust to hail it as a masterpiece of Jurisprudence. But it is enrooted in life, and drew its sustenance from my actual practice in fighting my dear Countess's battles. As Heine goes on to say, savoir and pouvoir are rarely united. Luther was a man of action, but his thought was not the widest. Lessing was a man of thought, but he died broken on the wheel of fortune. It was a combination of the two I tried to paint in my Ulrich von Hutten—the Humanist who transcended Luther and who was the morning ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was a father to me for ten years of my life, was almost a giant in his proportions, very symmetrical and "straight as an arrow." His face was not at all handsome. He had very quiet and reserved manners and was a man of action rather than of unnecessary words. Behind the veil of Indian reticence he had an inexhaustible fund of wit and humor; but this part of his character only appeared before his family and very intimate friends. Few men know ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... side they stood, the Captain tall and broad and sailor-like in his blue and gold—a man of action, bold of eye, hearty of voice, free of gesture; the other, his silver hair agleam in the setting sun, a man wise with years, gentle and calm-eyed, my Master Builder. Thus, as the distance lengthened, I stood watching until presently ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... single-file through the narrowing of a drift, she wondered about him. He was Western, plainly. An employee in the mine, probably a manager or director or whatever it was they called those in authority in mines. Plainly, too, he was a man of action and a man who engaged all her instinctive liking. Something in him at once coerced her friendliest confidence. These were the admissions she made to herself. She divined him, moreover, to be a blend of boldness and timidity. He was bold to the point of telling her things ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... she felt that he was talking the most dangerous nonsense, and she rather wanted to say so. Most of her life had been passed among soldiers. Her father had been a general in the Artillery. Her two brothers were serving in India. Her husband had been a bluff and straightforward man of action, full of hard commonsense, and the sterling virtues that so often belong to the martinet. Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie were specimens of manhood totally strange to her—until now she had not realised that ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... its details, although he refused to figure as its official editor and publisher. The amount of work he did during the months preceding the Congress was amazing. He was completely absorbed in every aspect of the Congress. The man of the pen revealed himself as a first-class man of action. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... skin; his curly hair, bound by a fillet, was unruly from the outdoor life he had been leading; the strong sinews of his arms and legs belied the ease of his pretended calling and the starry cloak he wore was laughable in its failure to disguise the man of action. He saluted the three women with a gesture of the raised right hand that no man unaccustomed to the use of arms could imitate, then turning slightly toward Livius, acknowledged his nod with ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... a good many mean and questionable things in his time, but never anything as gross as this. The thought of what his relation to a certain group of men—to Denny especially—would be in the future, stung sharply. But it is the part of the man of action to put both scruple and fear behind him on occasion. His career was ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... calm he returned to camp, slept, worked, slept and worked again. He decided that there was no help to be had from Lester, who was still no man of action. Better to work ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... bench—it was an English translation of a famous French treatise on Democracy; within its pages was Payne's pamphlet on the Rights of Man, its paper margins covered with written comments. This blacksmith was not only a man of action, but a man of thought also. I lay down on the bench, pillowing my head on one arm, thinking of him as I first saw him kneeling alone in prayer, and the simple words of his petition came back to me with new power. Then my mind drifted ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... which is recognized by Plato in this passage. But he is far from saying, as some have imagined, that inspiration or divine grace is to be regarded as higher than knowledge. He would not have preferred the poet or man of action to the philosopher, or the virtue of custom to the virtue based ...
— Meno • Plato
... movements were more abrupt than usual. Kim, with slightly raised head, was still staring at his totem on the table, when the Chaplain stepped on his right shoulder-blade. Kim flinched under the leather, and, rolling sideways, brought down the Chaplain, who, ever a man of action, caught him by the throat and nearly choked the life out of him. Kim then kicked him desperately in the stomach. Mr Bennett gasped and doubled up, but without relaxing his grip, rolled over again, and silently hauled Kim ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... WRITERS.—It is necessary to revert to the fourth century in order to enumerate Grecian Christian writers. As might be expected these were almost all controversial orators. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria was an admirable man of action, a fiery and impassioned orator, the highly polemical historian of the Church, after the manner of Bossuet in his History of Variations. Saint Basil, termed by his admirers "the Great," without there being ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... wonder that this man of thought could become so admirable a man of action. There was nothing fragile in this pale student. His eyes took on the hardness of steel. Never did more self-reliant and resolute an antagonist meet me. The hate that was manifest in his countenance ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... object we had in view to let slip the occasion of deposing the dynasty which stood in its way, it was necessary to lose no time in using the revolutionary part of the populace for that purpose. I assisted in doing so; my excuse is this—that in a time of crisis a man of action must go straight to his immediate object, and in so doing employ the instruments at his command. I made, however, one error in judgment which admits no excuse: I relied on all I had heard, and all I had observed, of the character of Trochu, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Each one a peerless picture, the powerful thinker, the man of action, who permits his restless intellect to repose, and suffers his heart to overflow with the love of youth! Were I vain, Octavianus, I might call each one of these letters a trophy of victory, an Olympic garland. The woman to whom Julius Caesar owned his subjugation might well hold her head higher ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
