The relation of thought to action filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it: Action is but coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling actions, of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the condensation of a multitude of truths and thoughts, and that the wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more active, the deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious, intelligent and moral action.

When the mind becomes conscious of itself as thought it simultaneously becomes conscious of itself as action. Thought and action, truth and freedom ('ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free') are inseparable, and are in fact correlative aspects of an indivisible reality. Hence they became simultaneously explicit in the mind's process of self-discovery.

The great men think, and you and I [also] think. But there is a difference. We think and our bodies do not follow. Our actions do not harmonise with our thoughts. Our words have not the power of the words that become Vedas. ... Whatever they think must be accomplished. If they say, “I do this,” the body does it. Perfect obedience. This is the end. You can think yourself God in one minute, but you cannot be [God].

The words we speak have a direct and definite effect upon our thoughts. Thoughts create words, for words are the vehicles of ideas. But words also affect thoughts and help to condition if not to create attitudes. In fact, what often passes for thinking starts with talk.

It is certainly true that ‘actions speak louder than words,’ but words become as monuments to thoughts.

The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.

Words are sensual. They seduce us and spark our imagination, but they also express intelligence and logic in constructing towers of ideals and culture.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Thought is the bud, language the blossom and action the fruit behind it.