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More "Man of action" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tired by his march his 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 to his own tent. The Mavericks were incurable practical jokers; and ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 and the most collectively ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... master restored order instantly, and this retired soldier, poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the matter in hand from the start. He issued orders like a martinet, and, almost before I could realise it, there were streaming buckets on the scene and a line of men and women formed between the building and the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the ceremonies, 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 his ears with his hands, [he] declared that it was such disputants who delayed ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... known Edgar the Dreamer, she would have been puzzled and alarmed. If Mr. Allan had known him he would have been angry. A man of action was John Allan. A canny Scotchman he, who owed his success as a tobacco merchant to energy and strict attention to business. If there were dreams in the bowl of the pipe, there was no room for them in the counting-house of a thrifty dealer in the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... 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 and a ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... Birdwood (a friend); strength, say, about 30,000. (A year ago I inspected them in their own Antipodes and no finer material exists); the 29th Division, strength, say 19,000 under Hunter-Weston—a slashing man of action; an acute theorist; the Royal Naval Division, 11,000 strong (an excellent type of Officer and man, under a solid Commander—Paris); a French contingent, strength at present uncertain, say, about a Division, under my old war comrade the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... nationalistic democracy of the interior. He could make no claim to statesmanship. He had held no important legislative or administrative position in his State, and his brief career in Congress was entirely without distinction. He was a man of action, not a theorist, and his views on public questions were, even as late as 1820, not clear cut or widely known. In a general way he represented the school of Randolph and Monroe, rather than that of Jefferson and Madison. He was a moderate protectionist, because he believed that domestic ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... true man of action, a knight of the Holy Ghost. He plunged fiercely into the human arena, and fought through a laborious life, against obscurantism, stupidity and tyranny. He had a clear-cut, aristocratic mind. He hated mystical balderdash, clumsy ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... 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
... indeed, almost before he expected it; but luckily Herrick was a man of action and grappled with the opportunity ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of an oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way that gave 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
... Old Jock Leish (in his ill-fitting broadcloth shore-clothes) might have passed for a prosperous farmer, but it needed only a glance at the keen grey eyes peering from beneath bushy eyebrows, the determined set of a square lower jaw, to note a man of action, accustomed to command. A quick, alert turn of the head, the lift of shoulders as he walked—arms swinging in seaman-like balance—and the trick of pausing at a windward turn to glance at the weather sky, marked the sailing shipmaster—the ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... He was a man of action, whose action, sharp, rapier-like, and instantaneous, was unsheathed only by instinctive feeling, by chivalry, honour, indignation, compassion, never by reflection, judgment, experience. He could not really think. What he learned had to reach him some other way. His mind ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... not to be expected in England before April. To communicate with Colville would be to turn that past dream, not wholly pleasant, into a grim reality. Loo therefore put off from day to day the evil moment. By nature and by training he was a man of action. He tried to persuade himself that he was made for a scholar and would be happy to pass the rest of his days in the study of that history which had occupied Septimus Marvin's thoughts ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Fontainebleau, Rambouillet. He had all the Bourbon 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 ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... change without limit, if they be abruptly destroyed civilization must suffer paralysis in some vital part. At once the most direct and striking proof of this lies in the fact that the revolutionist, whether he be propagandist or man of action, invariably commits himself, and ends by executing the very function he denied. At the moment when he comes to close quarters, and actually engages the object of his attack, he is swept into some current of endeavor ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Brady, being a man of action, wasted no energy in discussion. He jumped to the ground, pulled out first his overcoat and gripsack, fortunately unharmed, then the paper parcels of oatmeal and hominy, sticky and dripping. Swiftly corking the jug, he lifted it out of the carryall, together with ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... his writings and history and escape the conviction that there were two natures in this great man. There was the trained lawyer, man of action, prompt and brave in every emergency. But there was in him another nature higher than this. In all times men have entertained angels unawares, ministering spirits, whose missions are not wholly known to themselves even, men living beyond and in ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... these folk was disturbing to a man of action like McGuire. His eyes narrowed, and his lips were set for an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... persons of brains and capacity by whom the world is really ruled. The statesman in his cabinet is the god within the machine; it is he who directs the acts of nations, it is he who moves the fleets and armies as if they were pieces on the chess-board; to him, as a rule, is the man of action subordinate, obeying his behests. Rule and governance are his, power both in the abstract and the concrete. Seldom in the history of the world do we come across the men who are at one and the same time statesmen and soldiers, who, taking ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... the essential commonplaceness of this sort of thing recurred to Peter Maginnis. For all his life of idleness, which was, as it were, accidental, Peter was essentially a man of action; and life's sedentary movements irked ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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
... 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, adroit; with a fine temper, but keen and honest, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of wretched creatures, struggled in this manner against ill fortune, rivalry for the command broke out in Uraba. A certain Vasco Nunez Balboa[3] who, in the opinion of most people, was a man of action rather than of judgment, stirred up his companions against the judge Enciso, declaring that the latter possessed no royal patents giving him judicial powers. The fact of his being chosen by Hojeda ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... plate-armour of self-confidence lay concealed a curious and interesting man. The less narrow of them detected that something more was here than a strong administrator, and that they had among them an original man of action, with something of the aloofness and mystery ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... of both civil and religious despotism, his voice was incessantly raised in vindication of the inherent and inalienable right of every human being to the enjoyment of liberty. He was preeminently a man of action to whom nothing human was foreign, and whose gift of universal sympathy co-existed with an uncommon practical ability to devise corrective reforms that commanded the attention and won the approval of the foremost statesmen and moralists of his time. True, he also had a vision of Utopia, ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... morning he had gone about his errands very calmly, playing the man of action, in a new philosophy learned overnight. But now he forgot to imitate his teacher, and darted in, so headlong that all the dogs came with him, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... fact of psychology, 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 ...
— Meno • Plato
... your own arguments, though they be the weaker.... Secondly, you cloy your auditory: when you would be observed, speech must either be sweet, or short. Thirdly, you converse with Books, not Men ... who are the best Books. For a man of action & employment you seldom converse, & then but with underlings; not freely but as a schoolmaster with his scholars, ever to teach, never to learn.... You should know many of these tales you tell to ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... they 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
... Tancred ran by his side. When they came round the promontory they saw Mrs. Biggleswade waving frantically towards the station, and half-way to it two little figures running. Mr. Biggleswade showed himself a man of action. He swung round, and, with the swiftness of an accomplished boxer, dealt Sir Tancred an unexpected blow on the side of the head which knocked him over half-stunned, and almost in the same moment started to run after ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... given point, contradictory evidence seldom puzzles the man who has mastered the laws of evidence, but he knows little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... colonies of strangers who make their dwellings therein. Brought together by trouble, they live in tolerance among themselves, and none asks the other the fundamental question of upper society, "Whence art thou?"—nor does any make of his neighbour the inquiry which rises first to the lips of the man of action, "Whither goest thou?" They meet as the seaweed meets on the crest of the wave, of many colours from many distant depths, to intermingle for a time in the motion of the waters, to part company under the driving of the north ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... the girl. "I'll be absolutely frank with you, Bob. You are not the sort of man I wanted to love. Yes, I'll admit it—I wanted to love a soldier, a sailor, a man of action. I can never admire a man who will be content to spend his days in a library poring over old dusty books. That's why I have been angry when I've heard you glorifying these useless old fossils. And yet—oh, Bob!" and the ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... indifference, with a carelessness of their own fate, a willingness to 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 ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Charles was a man of action, of work, of fulfilment of duty. The moment that he perceived this love bond would impede his progress toward the lofty goals to which he aspired might easily mark the beginning of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... marvel at those sudden whims of silence and of song. He would come in on some poor excuse from his stable or cunningly listen above his book and try to understand; but he, the man of action, the soldier, the child of undying ambitions, was far indeed from comprehension. Only he was sure of her affection. She would come and sit upon his knee, with arms around his neck, indulgent madly in a child's caresses. Her uncle James, finding them thus sometimes, ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Xenophon was a philosophic man of action. He could make his value felt in a council of war, take part in battle—one of his books is on the duties of a commander of cavalry—and show himself good sportsman in the hunting-field. He wrote a book upon the horse; a treatise also upon dogs and hunting. He believed in God, thought ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... require, and select certain classes as best suited to your needs; (13) Foresee possible difficulties to be encountered and adjust your plans to meet them; and, most important of all, (14) Have a clear and persistent vision of yourself as a man of action, setting to work upon your plan at a fixed hour and carrying it to a successful issue ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... ex-Prefecture, if you please), "and put in solitary confinement at the very moment when Paris was in want of men of action and military experience." Oh, fie! men of the Commune, you had at your disposal a man of action—who does not know the noble actions of Citizen Lullier? A man of military experience—who does not know what profound experience M. Lullier has acquired in his numerous campaigns—and yet you put him, or rather throw him, into the Prefecture! ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... laws save those imposed by its own sense of artistic propriety. But we may often recognise, even where we cannot express in words, the strange family likeness which exists in characteristics which are superficially antagonistic. The man of action may be bound by subtle ties to the speculative metaphysician; and Hawthorne's mind, amidst the most obvious differences, had still an affinity to his remote forefathers. Their bugbears had become his playthings; but the witches, though they have no reality, have still ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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," he went on, lowering his voice almost ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... 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 ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... Armstrong was a man of action, and of words only as far as they helped action. He reached the starting of his school in 1868, within two years after he was assigned to duty at Hampton. For external help he had first the countenance ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... staring when people passed in the roadway. The sensitive side of his temperament shrank from this thinly-veiled hostility. He was by way of being popular in Steynholme, yet not a soul spoke to him. Before he reached the bridge, the other side of him, the man of action, of cool resource in an emergency, rose in rebellion against the league of silly clodhoppers. Back he strode to the post office and dashed off ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... 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, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... exception to this rule. He was a man of action as well as a man of letters. The writing of the books which have given him immortality was little more than an accident in his career, a comparatively trifling and casual item in the total expenditure of his many-sided energy. He was nearly sixty when he wrote ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... 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 star ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Thornton, instead of being shocked, seemed to have passed through that very stage of thought himself, and could suggest where the exact ray of light was to be found, which should make the dark places plain. Man of action as he was, busy in the world's great battle, there was a deeper religion binding him to God in his heart, in spite of his strong wilfulness, through all his mistakes, than Mr. Hale had ever dreamed. They never spoke of such things again, as ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... 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, ...
— 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
... 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, secure ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... time he has witnessed and in part heard; he has become acquainted with the prophet Tiresias who knows Past, Present and Future, who is the universal mind in its purity from all material dross; he has beheld the Place of Doom and its penalties, as well as the supreme Greek Hero, the universal man of action, Hercules. Nor must we forget that he has run upon a limitation, that Gorgon from whom he fled. Truly he has obtained in this journey to Hades a grand experience of the Past, of all Greek ages, which is now added to his own personal experience. So this Past, with its knowledge, is to be applied ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... man of letters, but a man of action, intensely impelled to action, and it was because he was forbidden to fulfil his enterprise in person, because he had to write letters of direction to those to whom he was compelled to entrust it, because he had to write letters to the future, and leave himself ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... came to him, he found that it was his destiny to suffer and be faithful to the death. I thought myself a decent minister of the gospel of peace; but when the hour of trial came to me, I found that it was my destiny to be a man of action and that my place was amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting. So I am starting life at fifty as Captain Anthony Anderson of the Springtown militia; and the Devil's Disciple here will start presently as the Reverend Richard Dudgeon, and wag his pow in my old pulpit, and give ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... Being essentially a man of action, Kelley did not stop with the mere observation of these evils but cast about to find a remedy. In doing so, he came to the conclusion that a national secret order of farmers resembling the Masonic order, of which he was a member, ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... instinct for hostility which is part of the equipment of every sensitively-nerved man of action, Craig soon turned toward her, addressed himself to her; and the others, glad to be free, fell away. Margaret was looking her best. White was extremely becoming to her; pink—pale pink—being next in order. Her dress was of white, with facings ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... paths to mountain peaks are ever rugged, but men reach the summits. Why should I fail? The road to power may be closed against me, but the road to love—" And he gazed into the eyes of the portrait, finding an answer in them. This man of action was a dreamer too. ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... for this purpose to make available in more readable form this timely portion of the Bible. In John Mark the missionary is revealed a man of action. This characteristic influences strongly the point of view and style of his writing. As John, the beloved disciple, in "The Revelation" beholds the victorious Christ as "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," foretold by the ...
— Jesus of Nazareth - A Biography • John Mark
... sordid love for money for its own sake—this was to be the limit of an ambition which dealt in theories, in men, in nations, and not in livres and louis d'or! Law smiled bitterly. For an instant he was not the confident man of action and of affairs, not the man claiming with assurance the perpetual protection of good fortune. He sat there, alone, feeling nothing but the great human craving for sympathy and trust. A line of carriages swept back across the street at his window, and streams of nobles besought ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... 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 studio floor littered ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... I have 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 and refinement. That beautiful park! On afternoons I used to walk ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... 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 ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a man of action, however, and can not bear to see minutes pass without at least an effort to ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... relatives and friends, except on the solitary occasion of the departure of Don Ferrante Gonzaga from court. Such a temperament was invaluable in the stormy career to which he had devoted his life. He was essentially a man of action, a military chieftain. "Pray only for my health and my life," he was accustomed to say to the young officers who came to him from every part of his dominions to serve under his banners, "for so, long as I have these I will never leave you idle; at least in France. I love peace no better than the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a place on his own account in a series of Jewish Worthies, since neither as man of action nor as man of letters did he deserve particularly well of his nation. It is not his personal worthiness, but the worth of his work, that recommends him to the attention of the Jewish people. He was not a loyal general, and he was not a faithful chronicler of the struggle ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... 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' sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted the imagination ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... supported had been thoroughly awakened. Esteban was shouting at them, explaining that Dona Isabel had met with an accident. He was calling for a lantern, too, and a stout rope. Cueto thought they must all be out of their minds until he learned what had befallen the mistress of the house. Then, being a man of action, he, too, issued swift orders, with the result that by the time he and Esteban had run to the well both rope and lantern were ready for their use. Before Esteban could form and fit a loop for his shoulders there was sufficient help on hand to ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... there, for the overseer was a man of action, and prompt to take measures toward saving the life of the drowning man. For a human life was valuable in those early days of the American colonies, especially the life of a strong, healthy slave who could work in the broiling sunshine to ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... combines inspiration, apparently derived—in my judgment, really derived—from close communion with the Supernatural and the Celestial, a man who has that inspiration and adds to it the energy of a mighty man of action, such a man as that lives in communion on a Sinai of his own; and when he pleases to come down to this world below, seems armed with no less than the terrors and decrees of the Almighty Himself." Now both forms of concentration must be practised so ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... save this country,' said Tancred, 'I am sure you would be a public benefactor. I have observed what you and Mr. Con-ingsby and some of your friends have done and said, with great interest. But Parliament seems to me to be the very place which a man of action should avoid. A Parliamentary career, that old superstition of the eighteenth century, was important when there were no other sources of power and fame. An aristocracy at the head of a people whom they had plundered of their means ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Sumner was a man of action and he faced the situation squarely. To him, California and the nation will always be indebted. One of his first decisive acts was to check the secession movement in Southern California by placing a strong detachment of soldiers at Los Angeles. This ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... catalepsy of literary composition, I am essentially the man of action. I laid aside my novel for future reference, and, after a fruitless lunge at the hen as it passed, joined ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... things go his way, without drifting into success by a fortunate turn in tide and wind. He was not a mere day-dreamer, a theorist, a philosopher, a scholar, although he possessed the gifts of each. He was, rather, a man of action—self-willed, self-reliant, independent—as ambitious as Burr without his slippery ways, and as determined as Hamilton with all his ability to criticise an opponent. Clinton relied not more upon men than upon measures, and in the end the one thing that made ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Solly was a man of action. Within a minute he was talking to the managing director of the Mammoth Syndicate Halls on the telephone. In five minutes the managing director had agreed to pay Prince Otto of Saxe-Pfennig five hundred pounds a week, if he could ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... consequence thereof) emancipation. He hath also (in course of his pursuit) to incur sin. Having obtained again fruits of both virtue and vice which are transitory, (heaven having its end as also hell in respect of the virtuous and the sinful), the man of action becometh once more addicted to action as the consequence of his own previous virtues and vices. The man of action, however, who possesseth intelligence, destroyeth his sins by his virtuous acts. Virtue, therefore, is strong, and hence the success ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to its tremendous import—primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through hundreds of thousands of years to the beast ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... down. Theirs was a conflict as cruel, as hard and brutal as men smashing at each other with fists, and they then proved their right to the shining roll of honor, wherever and whatever that roll may be. They fought on past pain, past sickness, past poisoning, that man of action and men ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... not fail to attract attention in the company street. The men were uneasy, for the colonel was noticeably a man of action as well as of temper. Their premonitions were fulfilled when at assembly the next morning, an official announcement was read to the attentive regiment. The colonel, who was a strategist as well ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... close of his life he was an earnest and sincere patriot. He died in 1803, at the age of eighty-one years. Not an orator like Patrick Henry, but a man of action like Washington, he had great power in dealing with men. Truly his life was one of great and ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... step upon the pavement. A man was standing before her, whose face, despite its 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 Perolla, the ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... General Miramon, 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 ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... this very fiery particle is too busy with side-issues to make acquaintance with the deeper mysteries of his religion. When he complains that people do not know what Christianity is, one wonders whether his own definition would satisfy the saints. He is a fighter rather than a teacher, a man of action rather than a seer. I do not think he could be happy in a world which presented him with no opportunities ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... to see him, he was bitterly aware. And nearer at hand circumstances had shot him clear out of the orbit of all those he had known as he grew to manhood. Recalling them, he had no more in common with them now than any forthright man of action has in common with narrow visionaries. It was not their fault, he knew. They were creatures of their environment, just as he had been. But he had outgrown all faith in creeds and forms before a quickening sympathy with man, a clearer understanding ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of the group of 19th Century incumbents was Don Miguel Tacon, who ruled from June 1, 1834, until April 16, 1838. His record would seem to place him quite decidedly in the "reactionary" class, but he was a man of action who left behind him monuments that remain to his credit even now. One historian, Mr. Kimball, who wrote in 1850, describes him as one in whom short-sightedness, narrow views, and jealous and weak mind, were joined to an uncommon stubbornness of character. Another, Mr. M.M. Ballou, ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and yet was as substantial as any man of action. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... appeared in person to testify of what he had seen. Certainly the Cavalier predominated in him, the type to which he belonged being of the noble one "of which the Elizabethan age produced so many examples—the man of action who was also the man of letters; the man of letters who was also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... hardly knew how 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 ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a desire to go back to the land of derby hats and starched collars?" I asked him. "You seem to be a handy man and a man of action," I continued, "and I am sure I could find you a comfortable job somewhere in ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... estranged. The memory of his father rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied; despair sharpened into wrath. There was one who had led armies in the field, who had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy, and buzzed about by priests? A pretty king, if he had not a martial son to lean ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "A man of action, and not of words," commented Martin, who spoke first. "I like him. Come, let us go for ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... he been a fiery Italian, instead of a doubting, deliberating Dane; had he been of a passionate, or yellow complexion, instead of a calm blonde; had he possessed a wiry, high-strung, and nervous constitution; had he, in a word, proved himself a man of action, and not a man of metaphysical tendencies, his sword would have soon cut the perplexing meshes which surrounded him, and he would have executed instant vengeance upon the authors of his misfortune and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 magical dances. When a savage wants sun ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... distorts his huge mouth with energy to thunder out a joyous Amen. 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 ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was a very large, high, and noble forehead—the forehead attributed to Shakespeare and seen in his busts. Shakespeare's intellect is beyond inquiry, yet he was not altogether a man of action. He was, indeed, an actor upon the stage; once he stole the red deer (delightful to think of that!), but he did not sail to the then new discovered lands of America, nor did he fight the Spaniards. So much intellect is, perhaps, antagonistic to action, or rather ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... less 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 ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... this posturing. The all but moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his time—actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews. The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... possible but that she had lied to him, but that her warm loving kisses were false and scheming. His heart scouted that idea with a blind rage that impelled him to hit out in the darkness. This spiritual fight tore the man of action, racked him limb from limb. Oh! to have been able to settle it, bare-armed and abreast of a living antagonist in the child's play of merely physical strife. He found tears on his cheek and this weakness amazed him, but his thoughts followed each other quickly, disconnectedly, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... man and a wicked one, just as he can be a fool and a devoted 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
... something of the feeling of the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. CAMPERDOWN essentially a man of action. No use mooning round deserted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... accustomed to his comings and goings, though they seldom knew where he went or definitely when he would return. His mildness of manner was a source of comment among those who knew him for what he was. And his very mildness of manner was one of his greatest assets in gaining information. Essentially a man of action, silent as to his plans and surmises, yet he could talk well ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... sun wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. His mouth was thinner and the corners not so deep. The old scowl between his eyes had traced two permanent lines there. The mass of brown hair still swept his dreamer's forehead. His jaws had become the jaws of a man of action. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... 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 she was launched ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... that I was gradually falling into bad odour with them, and that the blow would certainly fall, ere long. Over and over again I have thought of making my escape from it all; but you see, I am not a man of action, as you are. I did not see how the matter was to be effected—where to go or what to do. I was like a boy shivering at the edge of the bank, and afraid to plunge in; then another comes behind him and pushes ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... a 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 put it, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... pale cast of thought"—frank pessimists, or, at best, make-believe optimists. The courage of the warlike stock may be as hardly tried as before, perhaps more hardly, but the enemy is self. The hero has become a monk. The man of action is replaced by the quietist, whose highest aspiration is to be the passive instrument of the divine Reason. By the Tiber, as by the Ganges, ethical man admits that the cosmos is too strong for him; and, destroying every bond ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker and the adventurer, so he also cultivated his ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... spite of the misery which had befallen his nation, could still rejoice in the sensuous beauty of the world. There was another side to the Renaissance, dependent neither on beauty nor heroic grandeur, yet sharing in both through qualities of its own. Titian, who painted the living man of action, the man of parts, susceptible alike to the appreciation of ideal beauty and heroic impulse, but guided withal by expediency, reflected this more practical aspect of life. In his portraiture he expressed the statecraft for which Italians found ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... somewhat old and likewise rheumatic, Captain Dale was still a man of action, and less than half an hour later he had perfected an arrangement with the Secret Service authorities both at Rackville and at Camp Huxwell. Three automobiles were requisitioned and a detail of sixteen men, accompanied by several Secret Service ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... 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 had it become ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... the rightness of the action, and we went with him, although we did not accept his philosophy. To divorce action from the thought underlying it was not perhaps a proper procedure and was bound to lead to mental conflict and trouble later. Vaguely we hoped that Gandhiji, being essentially a man of action and very sensitive to changing conditions, would advance along the line that seemed to us to be right. And in any event the road he was following was the right one thus far; and, if the future meant a parting, it would be folly to anticipate ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... philosophic man of action. He could make his value felt in a council of war, take part in battle—one of his books is on the duties of a commander of cavalry—and show himself good sportsman in the hunting-field. He wrote a book upon the horse; a treatise ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... dramas, and as a philanthropic ruler King Harsha bestowed his favours with a fairly equal hand on Hinduism and on Buddhism alike. For Buddhism still lingered in the land, and Harsha, who was a mystic and a dreamer as well as a man of action, certainly inclined during his later years towards Buddhism, or, at least, included it in ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... 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
... valuable than a study of the causes that produced and modified these successive ideals. Thus in the moral type of pagan antiquity the civic virtues occupied incomparably the foremost place. The idea of a supremely good man was essentially that of a man of action, of a man whose whole life was devoted to the service of his country. The life and death of Cato were for generations the favourite model. He was deemed, in the words of an old Latin historian, to be of all men the one 'most like to virtue.' This pattern retained its force ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... concocted his plan, overruled all the objections thrown out by the Jew, and, as he was a man of action, he insisted on a tailor being instantly sent for. In ten minutes afterwards the well-known artist Paolo Muhajiar made his appearance, and, though he was somewhat astounded at the shortness of the time allowed him to rig the Greek stranger in a suit of mufti, a show of some broad gold pieces ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... asked Peleg quickly. The sturdy colonel in control of the forces of the entire region was known to be a man of action, and one whose activities were familiar to all ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... at one moment it gave the impression of resolution, at another it suggested the wayward abstraction of the dreamer. He was well-figured, with a hand of peculiar whiteness, suggesting in its breadth more the man of action than of meditation. But it was a contradiction; for, as you saw it rise and fall, you were struck by its dramatic delicacy; as it rested on the railing of the veranda, by its latent power. You faced incongruity ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... varied his method of instruction by administering corporal chastisements to his hearers when they laughed at his doctrines, or at the mistakes he made in their language, while preaching to them. Ugarte, like his predecessors, could not move the Indians to hunt the puma, but he was a man of action, with a wholesome belief in the efficacy of example, and his ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... long afterwards made away with. Pelopidas, Pherenikus, and Androkleides, with many others, went into exile and were outlawed by proclamation. Epameinondas stayed at home disregarded, not being thought to be a man of action, because of his philosophical habits, nor a man of any power, because ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... surrounded? He was not physically helpless, by any means, but the fact that he had no remedy against the attitude of the men of Hog Mountain chafed him almost beyond endurance. He was emphatically a man of action—full of the enterprises usually set in motion by a bright mind, a quick temper, and ready courage; but, measured by the impassiveness which these men had apparently borrowed from the vast aggressive ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... 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 make ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the literary arena than anywhere else, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author’s private letters. One advantage—and surely it is a very great one—that the “writing man” has over the man of action is this: that, while the portrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, by the biographer, the writing man paints his own ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... stories indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action. Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel—a training not of books but of life. And it is life that he loves—the delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... of the sorrows and rewards of genius unappreciated and before its age; for Elsley's secret vanity could see in himself a far greater likeness to Dolcino, than Dolcino—the preacher, confessor, bender of all hearts, man of the world and man of action, at last crafty and all but unconquerable guerilla warrior—would ever have acknowledged in the self-indulgent dreamer. However, it was a fair conception enough; though perhaps it never would have entered Elsley's head, had Shelley never ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... neighbouring inhabitants had fled before the French soldiers, in the belief that they were destroyers of religion and eaters of babies: this was inconvenient, as it prevented the supply of provisions and the success of forced loans. The letter suggests that he was a man of action rather than of ideas, and probably it was this practical quality which bound Buonaparte in friendship to him. Yet it is difficult to fathom Buonaparte's ideas about the revolutionary despotism which was then deluging Paris with blood. Outwardly he appeared ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... nature to practical politics, or in fact to any activity save that of ideas, I was far from regarding myself as mere material for a scholar, an entertaining author, a literary historian, or the like. I thought myself naturally fitted to be a man of action. But the men of action I had hitherto met had repelled me by their lack of a leading principle. The so-called practical men at home, lawyers and parliamentarians, were not men who had made themselves masters of any fund of new thoughts ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... 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
... you were born to be a man of action. Your instinct is always to do something energetic. But supposing, for argument's sake, that we had him arrested tonight, what on earth the better off should we be for that? We could prove nothing against him. There's the devilish cunning of it! If he were acting through a ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... picturesque and repentant, and dramatized the meeting, a lump in his throat. 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 studio floor ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... chosen for this purpose to make available in more readable form this timely portion of the Bible. In John Mark the missionary is revealed a man of action. This characteristic influences strongly the point of view and style of his writing. As John, the beloved disciple, in "The Revelation" beholds the victorious Christ as "the Lion of the tribe of Judah," foretold by the prophets, so Mark sees Jesus of Nazareth as the ...
— Jesus of Nazareth - A Biography • John Mark
... floats that vague sphere of cloud is thinking "Poor fellow, how sad!" while he who gives birth to that sharply-defined disc is already rushing forward to see in what way he can be of assistance. The one is a dreamer, though of acute sensibilities; the other is a man of action. ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Of course there's been the most awful mix-up. Trust Spain for that. The Post Office knew they couldn't deliver the wire. Instead of telling somebody, or communicating with Pau, they let it lie in the office till this afternoon. Then they took it to the mayor. Of course he nearly died. But, being a man of action, he got a move on. He flew round here and laid the facts before the steward—the owner happens to be away—and arranged to put this house at your disposal. Then he rushed round, borrowed a couple of cars, and spent what time he had left splitting ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... way Harry puzzled his brain for some time, sitting on the side of the bed, mystified, and quite at a loss what to do. But, as he was essentially a man of action, he soon grew weary of idle speculation, and determined to search more actively into the mystery, and if possible sift it to the bottom. So he drew a match and lighted his torch. The flame flared up brightly and flung a lurid glow all around. Holding this high above his head, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... 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 she was ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... fortunately or unfortunately for himself, was a man of action and no dreamer. He dismissed the ideas and came to ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... precious 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 "To labour ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... could still rejoice in the sensuous beauty of the world. There was another side to the Renaissance, dependent neither on beauty nor heroic grandeur, yet sharing in both through qualities of its own. Titian, who painted the living man of action, the man of parts, susceptible alike to the appreciation of ideal beauty and heroic impulse, but guided withal by expediency, reflected this more practical aspect of life. In his portraiture he expressed ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... select certain classes as best suited to your needs; (13) Foresee possible difficulties to be encountered and adjust your plans to meet them; and, most important of all, (14) Have a clear and persistent vision of yourself as a man of action, setting to work upon your plan at a fixed hour and carrying it to a successful issue within a ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... side-issues to make acquaintance with the deeper mysteries of his religion. When he complains that people do not know what Christianity is, one wonders whether his own definition would satisfy the saints. He is a fighter rather than a teacher, a man of action rather than a seer. I do not think he could be happy in a world which presented him with no opportunities for ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... sums up in a few words the character of the true gentleman and man of action in describing that of the great admiral, Sir Francis Drake: "Chaste in his life, just in his dealings, true of his word; merciful to those that were under him, and hating nothing so much as idlenesse; in matters especially of moment, he was never wont to rely on other men's care, how trusty ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... conspirators at liberty, though all the while watching them, hoping to discover the ramifications of the plot. Nevertheless, the government found its hand to a certain extent forced by Georges Cadoudal, a man of action who took counsel of himself only, and who was hiding in Paris with twenty-five chouans for the purpose of ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... one of the few literary men of his day who was not above using the Italian tongue, treating it seriously as a language and not merely as a debased form of Latin. He was eminent as a juris-consult, and, being a man of action as well as a man of letters, he had filled the office of Podesta in various cities; he had found employment under Lorenzo dei Medici, and latterly under Ercole d'Este, whom we ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... democracy of the interior. He could make no claim to statesmanship. He had held no important legislative or administrative position in his State, and his brief career in Congress was entirely without distinction. He was a man of action, not a theorist, and his views on public questions were, even as late as 1820, not clear cut or widely known. In a general way he represented the school of Randolph and Monroe, rather than that of Jefferson and Madison. He was a moderate protectionist, ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... was a big game guide—a life he loved. He was a man of action and asked nothing better than the perils of his calling; the stalking of the great Plutonian ice bears; crouching in a Venusian swamp waiting for the ten-ton lizards to blow slime a hundred feet in the air and rise from their lava-hot beds; matching wits with the telepathic Uranian rock wolves, ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... Celia says that she ordered them and chose all the papers herself, and that all I did was to say that the papers she had chosen were very pretty; but this doesn't sound like me in the least. I am convinced that I was the man of action when it came to ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... had finally determined to compel the bold rascals who had swindled his father to disgorge, he had taken in the Rue Lafitte a small, plainly-furnished apartment on the entresol, a fit dwelling for the man of action, the tent in which he takes shelter on the eve of battle; and he had to wait upon him an old family servant, whom he had found out of place, and who had for him that unquestioning and obstinate devotion peculiar ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... round, saw that in the hedge was a wicket-gate, and over this gate a man was leaning. A little, thin man with the face of an ascetic, or mediaeval saint, a face of a high and noble beauty, upon whose scholarly brow sat a calm serenity, yet beneath which glowed the full, bright eye of the man of action. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... 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 ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... at make-believe. In the mean time let us keep each other company a little. Surely it is dull for a man of action to be a prisoner, and for my own part I mope sadly now that my little ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the unnatural courage born of desperation, flung himself on the step, and climbing into the cart, fell in the straw at the bottom of it, sobbing out that he wanted to go back, go back! The situation had a vagueness; but the farmer, a man of action rather than words, swung his horse round smartly, and they were in the town again by the time Harold had recovered himself sufficiently to furnish some details. As they drove up to the shop, the woman was waiting at the door with the parcel; and hardly a minute seemed to have elapsed ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... it is sometimes terrible. 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
... clever companion, and one who bore about him the evidences of distinction and thorough breeding. As far as family went, the Kings were as old as a young country could expect, and Reggie King was, moreover, in spite of his wealth, a man of action and ability. His yacht journeyed from continent to continent, and not merely up the Sound to Newport, and he was as well known and welcome to the consuls along the coasts of Africa and South America as he ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... learned much of human failings since she left her sheltered home, but he thought the sweetness of character which could not be spoiled by knowledge of evil was greatly to be admired. He was, however, a man of action and ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... a noble scheme indeed, prompted by a kindly and honourable nature, and I must say that it sounded very well as the periods swelled from Captain Amber's lips. For Captain Amber was a scholar and a gentleman as well as a man of action, and he spoke and wrote with a certain florid grace that suited him well, and that impressed me at the time very profoundly. It seemed to me that Captain Amber was not merely one of the noblest of men—which indeed he was, as I was to learn often and ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... saw of this dogmatic dreamer, this erratic man of action, the more she liked him, the more she found really admirable in him. But mixed with her admiration was an alert and pugnacious fear, so big was he, so powerful, so violently hostile to all the principles involved in her belief that the whole wide world of action should ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... condition, familiar to every genuine man of action, in which, though the mind divides against itself, and there is an apparently even conflict between two impulses, the battle is lost and won before it is fought, and the fight is nothing but a sham fight. He wandered about the roofs; he went ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... men to meditate is to premeditate. What could be the premeditation of Louis Bonaparte? What was working in his mind. Questions which all asked themselves, two persons excepted,—Morny, the man of thought; Saint-Arnaud, the man of action. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... was expressive of that melancholy and contemplative calmness habitual to the Indian and the Arab, who possess the happy privilege of uniting, by a rare combination, the meditative indolence of the dreamer with the fiery energy of the man of action—now delicate, nervous, impressionable as women—now determined, ferocious, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... his life he was an earnest and sincere patriot. He died in 1803, at the age of eighty-one years. Not an orator like Patrick Henry, but a man of action like Washington, he had great power in dealing with men. Truly his life was one of great and ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... mind is higher than the ideal. One man sees directly the meaning of the things, the events and situations before him; another reasons it all out. And contrary to many of our current beliefs, the former is often the man of action; he sees at a flash to the heart of the matter, and gets things done. His thought, his activity, is vivid; and his words are likely to be so as well. The idealist, if he be broadminded, and not merely sentimental, is indeed likely to be the practical ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... he told his overseer that he was going to Sydney for a trip, and being a man of action, packed his valise, mounted his horse, and rode off on his journey of five hundred miles to the nearest seaport where he ...
— In The Far North - 1901 • Louis Becke
... writings and history and escape the conviction that there were two natures in this great man. There was the trained lawyer, man of action, prompt and brave in every emergency. But there was in him another nature higher than this. In all times men have entertained angels unawares, ministering spirits, whose missions are not wholly known to themselves even, men living beyond and in advance ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... 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
... best people, laying down with a firm good taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... 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 master-mind only ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... result and expression of many different habits and dexterities. His features were bold and aquiline; his expression arrogant and predatory; his whole appearance that of a swift, violent, unscrupulous man of action; and his copious white hair and the deep sabre-cut that traversed his nose and temple added a note of savagery to a head already remarkable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 and a ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... determined once for all to settle matters decisively, so far as he was personally concerned, Yuan Shih-kai deliberately followed the policy of holding back and delaying everything until the very incapacity marking both sides—the Revolutionists quite as much as the Manchus—forced him, as man of action and man of diplomacy, to be acclaimed the sole mediator and ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... 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 ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... position among the liberators of mankind; but Jerome Otway had more zeal than power, and such powers as he commanded were scattered over too wide a field of enthusiastic endeavour. He succeeded neither as man of thought nor as man of action. His verses were not quite poetry; his prose was not quite literature; personally he interested and exalted, but without inspiring confidence such as is given to the born leader. And in this year 1886, when two or three letters on the Irish Question appeared over his signature, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... take the different chapters as they stand, and in their obvious meaning. "The man of meditation is superior to the man of action," says Chapter I., 46, "therefore, Arjuna, become a man of meditation." How the man of meditation is to proceed is told in Chapter VI., 10-14. "Let him who has attained to meditation always strive to reduce his heart to rest in the Supreme, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... 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
... 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 him was ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... 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
... ordinary official, and that beneath the silken surcoat of courtesy and the plate-armour of self-confidence lay concealed a curious and interesting man. The less narrow of them detected that something more was here than a strong administrator, and that they had among them an original man of action, with something of the aloofness and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... 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
... no mere man of action. It is difficult to understand when it was that he had time to pick up his knowledge of general literature; or how he made room for it in a mind so crammed with facts and statistics relating to questions of the day that when Wilberforce was at a loss for a piece of ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... 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. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... 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 and refinement. That ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... a catalepsy of literary composition, I am essentially the man of action. I laid aside my novel for future reference, and we passed out of the paddock in the following order. First, Aunt Elizabeth, as fresh as paint, going well. Next, Bob, panting and obviously doubtful of his powers of staying the distance. Lastly, myself, determined, but wishing I ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... Oh for a man of action and of prayer, Who feels this sin a national disgrace; A man who has the strength to do and dare The pluck and ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... 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 is up the Bosphorus, beating about in his little ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... to Mr. Payne his own, I have had no desire to detract from Burton. Indeed, it is impossible to take from a man that which he never possessed. Burton was a very great man, Mr. Payne is a very great man, but they differ as two stars differ in glory. Burton is the magnificent man of action and the anthropologist, Mr. Payne the brilliant poet and prose writer. Mr. Payne did not go to Mecca or Tanganyika, Burton did not translate The Arabian Nights, [10] or write The Rime of Redemption and Vigil and Vision. He did, however, produce the annotations of The ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... 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
... exile, despair, broken followers, mourning faces, empty pockets, friends estranged. The memory of his father rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied; despair sharpened into wrath. There was one who had led armies in the field, who had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy, and buzzed about by priests? A pretty king, if he had not a martial son to lean upon! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... movements on the previous night, and discovering where she had flown. The deeper questions of motive and the inconsequence of some of her actions he preferred to leave till later. Action, and not mental analysis, was the need of the moment. Barrant prided himself on being a man of action, and he was also a detective. The thrill of pursuit stirred ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... released Jean, who led her from the tower. If she was broken and trembling he was erect and resolute; no longer the soft lover, but the prompt man of action. She felt the bracing influence. "We have three days," he said. "Within that time we must flee. I will not return to the cave; my task must be to repair the boat." He mentioned certain articles which ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... and hard to rouse, when in action became vehemently excited, and tried to outdo 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 ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a 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 put it, "enrich the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... dynamite wars had been a great actor in his time—actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews. The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action; he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... believe that the European soul, unaided, impoverished and scorched by centuries of spendthrift existence, would be likely to flicker and even to go out, unless regenerated by an influx of the thought of other races.—But to each day its own task. Nicolai, at once thinker and man of action, turns to the most immediate duty. Concentrating all his energies upon a single aim, he accelerates the moment of attainment. "Just as certain of our forefathers, in advance of their time, enthusiastically advocated a united Germany, even so do we mean to ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... moment. He was quite practical and matter-of-fact; and had the air of a man of action rather than of one who deals in thoughts, and twists them hither and thither so that good is made to look ridiculous, and bad is tricked out with a fine new name. He frowned as he looked at the fire with eyes that flitted from one object to ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... of the great man of action is less conditioned by principle than the tragedy of other types of greatness, because he is not limited by the universal restrictions of humanity, but by individual and accidental ones. He recognises, partly because of his unmetaphysical ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... intellect in the end, but sometimes lulls both temporarily, when immediate issues are pending. The waterfall cheers and purifies infinitely, but it marks no moments, has no reproaches for indolence, forces to no immediate decision, offers unbounded to-morrows, and the man of action must tear himself away, when the time comes, since the work will not be done for him. "The natural day is very calm, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... it seemed as if Sir Percy were about to reveal something of great importance to his friend, then once more he checked himself. The Scarlet Pimpernel was, above all, far-seeing and practical, a man of action and not of impulse. The glowing eyes of his friend, his nervous, febrile movements, did not suggest that he was in a fit state to be entrusted with plans, the success of which ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was the key to it all. Every dreamer should also be a man of action, every soldier a volunteer to his own idealism; and at once I understood that strange combination between the "intellectuals" and the "workers" which formed such a unique feature of the rebellion, and which the prosperous citizens of Dublin—penned up in their houses for the ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... when it becomes necessary, without any preliminary rehearsal, to play the most difficult of parts, and to avoid the ridicule which is grinning at you from the folds of the curtains; to be at one and the same time a diplomatist, a barrister, and a man of action, and by skill, tact, and eloquence render the sternest of realities acceptable without banishing the most ideal ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... knew what he meant by this portentous guarantee, but it was evident that Daubeney, if nothing else, was a man of action, and his ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... 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? ... What ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... passed there, for the overseer was a man of action, and prompt to take measures toward saving the life of the drowning man. For a human life was valuable in those early days of the American colonies, especially the life of a strong, healthy slave who could work in the broiling sunshine to win the ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... and "men of action" are sometimes contrasted—which is hardly fair to either, since the great man of action must have the imagination to conceive a plan, and must know exactly what he is aiming to accomplish, while the great thinker must be persistent in thinking and must get into action by way of writing or somehow making his ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... people over whom he stood in authority, and his beneficent gifts to the monasteries of Ely and Ramsey had won for him the reputation almost of a saint. The monks regarded him as a man of quiet and thoughtful life, absorbed in acts of charity; but he proved that he could be a man of action also, for he was soon to become the hero of one of the most famous and disastrous battles ever fought ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... "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 ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... experience and a man of action, he had an admirable wisdom, and made no pretension to systematic theories. He took no side beforehand; he made no show of the principles that were to govern him. Thus, there was nothing like a logical harshness ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Man of action though she knew him to be, she never anticipated he would or could act so directly. He reached out and seized her left hand and scanned it significantly. Then he ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... heavy and massive, with a big petulant face not without intelligence, and Truda had known him of old in Paris. She looked at him now with some anxiety, trying to gauge his susceptibility. He had the spacious manners of a man of action, smiled readily and with geniality; but Truda realized that she had never before made him a request, and the real character of the man ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... to thunder out a joyous Amen. 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 ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the first day he had taken up his abode on the land which afterwards became known as the Foss River Ranch until now, when he was acknowledged to be a power in the stock-raising world. She was a woman of sound, practical, common sense; he was a man of action rather than a thinker; she was a woman whose moral guide was an invincible sense of duty; he was a man whose sense of responsibility and duty was entirely governed by an unreliable inclination. Moreover, he was obstinate without being possessed of great strength of will. They were characters ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... number being a little less than three years. On the whole, the most notable of the group of 19th Century incumbents was Don Miguel Tacon, who ruled from June 1, 1834, until April 16, 1838. His record would seem to place him quite decidedly in the "reactionary" class, but he was a man of action who left behind him monuments that remain to his credit even now. One historian, Mr. Kimball, who wrote in 1850, describes him as one in whom short-sightedness, narrow views, and jealous and weak mind, were joined to an uncommon stubbornness of character. ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to its tremendous import—primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... should lie down and die. But Mr. Greeley was neither cold nor tough. He was keenly sensitive both to praise and blame. The applause of even paltry men gladdened him, and their censure stung him. Moreover, he had that intense longing for reputation as a man of action by which men of the closet are so often torn. In spite of all that his writing brought him in reputation, he writhed under the popular belief that he could do nothing but write, and he spent the flower of his years trying to convince the public that it was mistaken about him. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... Cromwell bore with him only as a kinsman, and respected him only as a scholar. Charles II. liked to laugh at his jokes, and to Saville his company was as good as an additional bottle of wine. His only chance of fame as a man of action arose from his connexion with the plot, which, however, in its issue covered him with infamy, as all bad things bungled, inevitably do ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... He was suddenly happy and light-hearted. Vassily was not in love with Olga, no! the word 'love' is not to be used lightly.... He had found an occupation, had set himself a task, and rejoiced with the delight of a man of action. He did not even remember that she was his mother's ward, and another man's betrothed. He never for one instant deceived himself; he was fully aware that it was not for her to be his wife.... Possibly ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... stoutly 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 ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... however, a man for tears. He was a man of action. The sudden vision which met his wandering gaze, the donkey calmly chewing scrub buds, with the green juice already oozing from the corners of his frothy mouth, acted upon him like magic. He was, after all, only human, and when he got hands upon a piece ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... of orthodox theology under shapes of fancy to the mind. Finally, in all the experiences of Manresa, he tried the temper of his own character, which was really not that of a poet or a mystic, but of a sagacious man of action, preparing a system calculated to subjugate the intelligence and will of millions. Tested by self-imposed sufferings and by diseased hallucinations, his sound sense, the sense of one destined to control men, gathered energy, and grew in, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... hunch I've always had. I don't like the idea of takin' any oath. I'm a man of action, Hovey. When the night comes, give me a club, and you'll see ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... that Dona Isabel had met with an accident. He was calling for a lantern, too, and a stout rope. Cueto thought they must all be out of their minds until he learned what had befallen the mistress of the house. Then, being a man of action, he, too, issued swift orders, with the result that by the time he and Esteban had run to the well both rope and lantern were ready for their use. Before Esteban could form and fit a loop for his shoulders there was sufficient ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... folk was disturbing to a man of action like McGuire. His eyes narrowed, and his lips were set for an abrupt retort when ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... interesting not only as a fine piece of Elizabethan prose but as exhibiting the attitude toward history, and the view of the relation of history to religion and philosophy, which characterized one who represented with exceptional vigor the typical Elizabethan man of action and who was also a man ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... differences in the amount of what 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
... schoolboy, as the expression of the highest patriotism in the noblest poetry. And just as our attitude towards Richard changes from contempt to pity and even admiration, so our admiration for Henry, the man of action and, as he calls himself, "the true-borne Englishman," turns into indignation at his usurpation of the throne and his connivance, to use no stronger term, at the murder of his sovereign. Throughout the play, however, Shakespeare ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... these the most perfect good-feeling, so that we may know that the 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 ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... 1: Friedrich Maximilian 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 ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... arguments for the reasonableness of Caesar's cause.[180] When war broke out he was greatly perplexed how to act; his breadth of view made decision difficult, and he seems to have been at all times more a student than a man of action. With some heart-burnings he joined Caesar in the struggle, and accepted from him the government of Achaia; it was at this time that he wrote the famous letter of consolation to Cicero on the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, which is full of true feeling ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... friendship had existed between them during their sojourn, in days of yore, in the capital; and as Y-ts'un had entertained the highest opinion of Leng Tzu-hsing, as being a man of action and of great abilities, while this Leng Tzu-hsing, on the other hand, borrowed of the reputation of refinement enjoyed by Y-ts'un, the two had consequently all along lived in perfect harmony ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the musicians, sirrah. Farewell, hostess; farewell, Doll. You see, my good wenches, how men of merit are sought after: the undeserver may sleep, when the man of action is called on. Farewell, good wenches: if I be not sent away post, I will see you again ere ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... Charlotte assumed proportions of a series of battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness, fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day's work; and the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon any other shoulders ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... them, said, "By Jove! that's Maria!" and started to run back. Sir Tancred ran by his side. When they came round the promontory they saw Mrs. Biggleswade waving frantically towards the station, and half-way to it two little figures running. Mr. Biggleswade showed himself a man of action. He swung round, and, with the swiftness of an accomplished boxer, dealt Sir Tancred an unexpected blow on the side of the head which knocked him over half-stunned, and almost in the same moment started to run after the children. He was half a mile from ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... corners of his eyes. His mouth was thinner and the corners not so deep. The old scowl between his eyes had traced two permanent lines there. The mass of brown hair still swept his dreamer's forehead. His jaws had become the jaws of a man of action. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Lakshmi as consort of Vishnu, which is a very marked feature of their community and has gained for them the title of Sri-vaishnavas. But Ramanuja was much more than a scholar and a writer of books; he was also a man of action, a "practical mystic." Like Samkara, he organised a body of sannyasis or ascetic votaries, into which, however, he admitted only Brahmans, whereas Samkara opened some of the sections of his devotees to non-Brahmans; ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... note he was writing. The tender lines had gone from his face, and he had become the stern man of action again. ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... was essentially a man of action rather than words. With all the coolness she could summon up Enid descended to the hall. She gave a little gesture of surprise and disdain as she caught ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... have given me the cap of invisibility, the purse of Fortunatus, and a pair of seven-league boots. He would have taught me to conquer worlds, and to leave the easy triumphs of dreamers to madmen, philosophers, and poets, He would have made me a man of action, a statesman, a soldier, a founder of cities or a digger of graves. For there are two kinds of men in the world when we have put aside the minor distinctions of shape and colour. There are the men who do things and the men who dream about them. No man ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Lord Doyne, the man of action, pushed them aside and tried the door-handle. It yielded, the door stood open, and the gust of cold wind entering the house extinguished the candle within. They entered and found themselves in a miserable stone-paved kitchen, furnished with poverty-stricken meagreness—a ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... with 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 attaches ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... on the deck. He was a tall man, with a red face, a man of action, of outdoor life, apparently a hard worker and a hard player. It was quite evident that he had been waiting for ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Phillips and Hawthorne would be the extremes, and Emerson and Wasson the mean terms. He was, in his way, as perfect an artist as Hawthorne, while he differed from him as the sea does from the land. He was more like Emerson in his mental methods, and was a man of action. While he took the same interest in public affairs as Wasson, the slavery question was the only point on which the two could ever agree. One was an ardent and unreflecting revolutionist; the other a systematic thinker and conservative ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... overcome them; he was strong, he would conquer. Anything was possible but that she had lied to him, but that her warm loving kisses were false and scheming. His heart scouted that idea with a blind rage that impelled him to hit out in the darkness. This spiritual fight tore the man of action, racked him limb from limb. Oh! to have been able to settle it, bare-armed and abreast of a living antagonist in the child's play of merely physical strife. He found tears on his cheek and this weakness amazed him, but his thoughts followed each other quickly, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... those 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 there is one time more than another when a man should not wear ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... bicycle!" he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet. "A bicycle!" Denis repeated. "A green machine, cross-framed, name of ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... great Jama Masjid at Delhi,—have a certain sensuous quality. They are not exactly decadent, but they suggest sweetness rather than strength. The Empire had been won, and Shah Jahan could indulge in luxury and ease. But Akbar had had to fight, and he remained to the end a man of action, and we see his character reflected in his stronghold Fatehpur-Sikri, which one visits from Agra and never forgets. If I were asked to say which place in India most fascinated me and touched the imagination I think I should name this ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... the only man of action on the summit energizing and quickening the defence, stands out prominently in the confusion, gloom, and half lights of Spion Kop. Buller's impulsive intervention made him responsible for the position, and ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... to be stimulated in the best sense of the word for the work of life. Perhaps it is not yet realised how great he was in the matter of knowledge as well as in action. Everybody knows that he was a great man of action in the fullest sense of the word. The Press has always proclaimed that. It is less often that a tribute is paid to him as a man of knowledge as well as a man of action. Two of your greatest experts in natural history told me the other day that Colonel Roosevelt ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... 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 • Rudyard Kipling
... blue cloth sides of it, a pleasant though acrid smell. My astonishment had passed, giving place to an exquisite satisfaction. How pottering and fumbling a thing was even the best kind of written criticism! I understood the contempt felt by the man of action for the man of words. But what pleased me most was that at last, actually, I, at my age, I of all people, had committed a crime—was guilty of a crime. I had power to revoke it. I might write to my bookseller for an unburnt copy, and place it on the shelf where this one had stood—this ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... 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 Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... 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
... were long and slim with tapering fingers, the hands of a thinker and an artist despite the acid stains which disfigured them but could not hide their beauty. The hands of his double were stained as were Dr. Bird's, but they were short and thick and bespoke more the man of action than the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
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