Quotes About Doing

Forget being the best of anything. That's the fruit of the action, and you do the work -they say- for the doing, not the fruit. You can never really know how it's gonna turn out in the world but you know if you enjoy doing it. And ideas start flowing and you start getting, you know, excited about stuff. Then you're having a great time in the doing and that's what it's all about. If you don't enjoy the doing, then do something else.

You do stand-up because you have to do it. If you're doing it to become 'famous,' you're wrong. If you're doing it to become a millionaire, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. In 2003, I was flat broke. I'd been doing stand-up for 14 years at that point. I loved it and just kept at it.

As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia.

But it's a blessing to be so successful within a year; it's the greatest feeling in the world, making money and doing the things that I'm doing, and I definitely trying to continue doing what I'm doing.

Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.

It's just madness. First email. Then instant message. Then MySpace. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then Twitter. It's not enough anymore to 'Just do it.' Now we have to tell everyone we are doing it, when we are doing it, where we are doing it and why we are doing it.

Whatever I'm doing, I'm in that moment and I'm doing it. The rest of the world's lost. If I'm cooking some food or making soup, I want it to be lovely. If not, what's the point of doing it?

I can't deal with actors! I can't deal with myself. We're neurotic and miserable... I love doing what I'm doing, but while I'm doing it, I'm miserable.

Do you know that disease and death must needs overtake us, no matter what we are doing?... what do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you?... If you have anything better to be doing when you are so overtaken, get to work on that.

I am happy doing standup so I don't ever want to stop doing it. But I wouldn't mind venturing off and doing other things that are creative.

There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!

Somebody can do a ten year stint in jail and when they come home, they can be a rapper. Or, they can go from doing the 9-5 thing and become a rapper because everyone else is doing it. I think that the test of time will tell. If you look around you'll find out who really wants to do it and who is doing it for the come up. I think that's the greatest separation. At some point along the line, it became gangsta to not be talented!

It's nice to have recognition for doing a good job, but at the end of the day, I'm just an actor and I'm doing my job and I'm always trying to get better at doing that job.

What I learned from comparisons and jealousies is that they point to where you haven't filled your cup or owned your gifts. They point to where you are not yet 100% you. We know that when you are fully engaged in doing what you're doing and your heart and creative spirit are involved, you couldn't care less what anybody else is doing.

You have to know what you're doing and where you're going. For some guys, the answer is just keep doing what you're doing. For other guys, that might not be the case. It just depends on what kind you are.

The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.

For so long, I was searching for something to be proud of. But at a certain point, I realized, 'Wait, I'm doing what I want to be doing. I'm not wanting to do it; I'm doing it.' And that's awesome.

I still perform live primarily. I just keep traveling and doing live shows. The main difference in film, you know in your mind that you are doing it for posterity, you are doing for the eventual audience and it will be around forever.

Before the whole Disney realm had undergone this huge revamping, as a kid, I always saw myself doing these dramatic indie parts. And then I fell in love with doing comedy and doing kid shows and really working for kids.

You look at Russia's doing with their nuclear capability and the newness of their capability, and look at we're - what we're doing, and nobody wants to do that with respect to nukes because nukes are horrible. But you have countries that are going out of their way to do things that we're not doing. And we have to be very, very careful.

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.

I would much rather have somebody say, "You know what? I just didn't like what you were doing," then say, "They didn't know what they were doing." I know what I'm doing. If it's going to be bad, or if it's great, it's me, in either case.

There are periods where you think, "What am I doing?" or "What am I doing it for?"; that's a more scary question. "I've made s---loads of money, I've left my mark in music, why am I still doing this?," and it takes a while to answer that question.

Acting is always sort of the same - like you want to be - you know you're pretending and you want to make it as real as you can. That's the similarity. The mediums other than that are completely different. I mean you know with camera work you're doing really small detailed work and you know if you do anything too big you've sort of failed. And with stage, especially with the play I'm doing right now, I'm doing a farce, and it's so over the top that you can't actually be too big. So it's just completely different.

I think success has a downside. The more successful you get and the more out there you are in the world, the more vulnerable you are and the more you are open to hate, especially because of social media. But it also depends what you class as success, because someone could do something mean and class that as success for them. But for me, if you're doing something positive that's allowing someone to have a better wellbeing, or embrace their life more, you have to go for it, but know there's always going to be people who hate on you for doing what you're doing.

What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call "here and now," and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing... The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep-down you is the whole universe.

I'm not very good at doing two things at the same time. I've never been good at the walk and bubblegum thing. I've been doing this 16 hours a day. I haven't had a day off. But it's very exciting, too, just to meet all these people doing really fertile stuff. It's sort of where I come from anyway, hanging out with people who believe in something incredible.

We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.

I don't mind if someone thinks I'm a sell out. I go to bed happy knowing I do what I do and I'm not doing anything for reasons of money, and if I were trying to pick up chicks, I'm doing a horrible job. And if I wanted to drive awesome cars, I'm doing a really bad job there too.

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

People like to see what you're doing and feel involved. Everyone craves that whole behind-the-scenes side of things. I think it's important to keep people involved with what you're doing and to shed a little light on what goes into the end result. There's pressure, but you have to keep it real. People forget that Instagram is there for fun and I try not to lose sight of that. It's not as serious as everyone thinks it is.

Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.

As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.

Sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do.

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

A really large percentage of kids from Duke go to work on Wall Street, and they make a lot of money, but they're almost slaves to their jobs, working crazy hours. Their job totally dominates their lives, and most of them aren't happy. So many of my friends are going down that path. I even thought about it for a second, like "Should I be doing that?" But I just pursued my dreams instead, and I always tell people to do that. Now I make more money than they do, and I'm doing what I love.

I never thought then I'd be doing what I'm doing now. At my high school, being on the girls soccer team was the cool thing to do, but that was definitely never going to happen for me, so I played music. Not because everyone thought it was awesome, but for the love of it.

There's such a wide variation in tax systems around the world, it's difficult to imagine a harmonized CO2 tax that every country agrees to. That's not in the cards in the near term. But the countries that are doing the best job, like Sweden, are already doing both of these. I think that eventually we'll use both of them but we need to get started right away and the cap-and-trade is a proven and effective tool.

When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.

People never ask people doing serious music, 'Do you ever think about doing funny music?'

While I think men and women are equal, they are also different and I think it's inevitable and I don't think it's a bad thing at all that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework.

There's something different about looking someone in the eyes and doing something dishonest to doing it over the phone or screen.

You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.

My parents brought me up with this philosophy. You must do things. You mustn't watch what other people are doing. You must not listen to what other people are doing.

You become a writer on a television show, and you see yourself doing bigger and better things, you don't wait till they tell you, "Here's the way to do bigger and better things," you start writing. You start writing that material that you might be doing off to the side. Nobody's going to be paying you for that, but it could turn into something big.

Doing what you want to do is easy. Doing what you have to do is hard.

Am I a star? That's a different thing. I mean no, I'm not in People magazine. But I must be doing something right, because I've done it for 50 years! And I like doing what I do.