Quotes about practice
page 34

Joseph Strutt photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo

“His practice is characterized by long asanas, or postures, that require extraordinary will and discipline.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

B. K. S. Iyengar, Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, Dies at 95

B.K.S. Iyengar photo
K. R. Narayanan photo

“When he stood in queues to vote in general elections, a few people criticised this practice, saying that a head of state should not be seen taking sides in an election. But the overwhelming response was that the President had done a service to democracy.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Venkitesh Ramakrishnan in: Citizen President K.R. Narayanan, 1920-2005. http://www.frontline.in/navigation/type=static&page=flonnet&rdurl=fl2224/stories/20051202005012500.htm, Frontline

Charan Singh photo

“He studied law, but unlike many Indian leaders who rose to political power as practicing lawyers, he became known not as a lawyer but as a politician.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

Source: Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, p. 80

Charan Singh photo
Aryabhata photo
James Braid photo
Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma photo
Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma photo
Paul Bernays photo
E. M. S. Namboodiripad photo
Rekha photo
Bal Gangadhar Tilak photo

“To bring in the mass of the people, to found the greatness of the future on the greatness of the past, to infuse Indian politics with Indian religious fervour and spirituality are the indispensable conditions for a great and powerful political awakening in India. Others, writers, thinkers, spiritual leaders, had seen this truth. Mr. Tilak was the first to bring it into the actual field of practical politics.”

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) Indian independence activist

Sri Aurobindo, 1918, quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). [3]

Bal Gangadhar Tilak photo

“The Congress movement was for a long time purely occidental in its mind, character and methods, confined to the English-educated few, founded on the political rights and interests of the people read in the light of English history and European ideals, but with no roots either in the past of the country or in the inner spirit of the nation…. To bring in the mass of the people, to found the greatness of the future on the greatness of the past, to infuse Indian politics with Indian religious fervour and spirituality are the indispensable conditions for a great and powerful political awakening in India. Others, writers, thinkers, spiritual leaders, had seen this truth. Mr. Tilak was the first to bring it into the actual field of practical politics….. There are always two classes of political mind: one is preoccupied with details for their own sake, revels in the petty points of the moment and puts away into the background the great principles and the great necessities, the other sees rather these first and always and details only in relation to them. The one type moves in a routine circle which may or may not have an issue; it cannot see the forest for the trees and it is only by an accident that it stumbles, if at all, on the way out. The other type takes a mountain-top view of the goal and all the directions and keeps that in its mental compass through all the deflections, retardations and tortuosities which the character of the intervening country may compel it to accept; but these it abridges as much as possible. The former class arrogate the name of statesman in their own day; it is to the latter that posterity concedes it and sees in them the true leaders of great movements. Mr. Tilak, like all men of pre-eminent political genius, belongs to this second and greater order of mind.”

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) Indian independence activist

Sri Aurobindo, (From an introduction to a book entitled Speeches and Writings of Tilak.), quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). https://web.archive.org/web/20170826004028/http://bharatvani.org/books/ir/IR_frontpage.htm

William John Macquorn Rankine photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo

“Some of the evils which are caused by the fallacy of an incompatibility between theory and practice having been described, it must now be admitted, that at the present time those evils show a decided tendency to decline.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

The extent of intercourse, and of mutual assistance, between men of science and men of practice, the practical knowledge of scientific men, and the scientific knowledge of practical men, have been for some time steadily increasing; and that combination and harmony of theoretical and practical knowledge—that skill in the application of scientific principles to practical purposes, which in former times was confined to a few remarkable individuals, now tends to become more generally diffused.
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Patrick Rothfuss photo
Paul Scholes photo

“Nobody else in the world can play the way Scholes does. The passes he produces all over the field and the way he changes the game is brilliant. Every manager would like him. But luckily he is here and playing with us. Paul practices that all the time. When he has finished training he always goes out and shoots.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

http://cantheyscore.com/2011/05/31/paul-scholes-50-quotes-that-define-a-legend/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SportBullet%2Ffeed+%28Sport+Bullet%29&utm_content=Google+UK
Dimitar Berbatov

Walter Warlimont photo
Nanak photo
Totaram Sanadhya photo

“Totaram was a remarkably able man. His writings in Hindi show a perception, idealism, tolerance, wit, balance, and shrewd practicality seldom matched by any of his European or Indian contemporaries, and as a debater he was supreme.”

Totaram Sanadhya (1876–1947) Fijian writer

K.L. Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants: A History to the end of Indenture in 1920, (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962).

Prem Rawat photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“In their last ditch, the royalists object that this all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols.
1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Julio Cortázar photo
Jane Austen photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice -- for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not -- involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life, than the smaller commonwealths of antiquity.”

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up pp. 230-233

John Stuart Mill photo
John Stuart Mill photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Robert Benchley photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Samuel Johnson photo
Teal Swan photo
Pierce Brown photo
Robert Greene photo
Teal Swan photo
Salvador Dalí photo
G. K. Chesterton photo

“I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humour, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown. 'Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I'm not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones.
The Dagger with Wings (1926)

Steven Wright photo

“In school they told me "Practice makes perfect."”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

And then they told me "Nobody's perfect," so then I stopped practicing.
When the Leaves Blow Away (2006), I Still Have a Pony (2007)

G. K. Chesterton photo

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.””

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.
"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Michel Henry photo

“The culture is the whole of the enterprises and of the practices in which the abundance of life expresses itself, they all have as motivation the 'load', the 'over' which disposes inwardly the living subjectivity as a force ready to give unstintingly itself and constraint, under the load, to do it.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, La Barbarie, éd. Grasset, 1987, p. 172
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Original: (fr) La culture est l'ensemble des entreprises et des pratiques dans lesquelles s'exprime la surabondance de la vie, toutes elles ont pour motivation la « charge », le « trop » qui dispose intérieurement la subjectivité vivante comme une force prête à se prodiguer et contrainte, sous la charge, de le faire.

Michel Henry photo

“Because practice is subjective, theory which is always the theory of an object, can't access to the reality of this practice, what it is in itself, but only represent it, in such a way that this representation lets out of itself the real being of practice, the effectivity of the doing. Theory does nothing.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 353
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Parce que la pratique est subjective, la théorie qui est toujours la théorie d’un objet, ne peut atteindre la réalité de cette pratique, ce qu’elle est en elle-même, sa subjectivité précisément, mais seulement se la représenter, de telle manière que cette représentation laisse hors d’elle l’être réel de la pratique, l’effectivité du faire. La théorie ne fait rien.

Benito Mussolini photo

“With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo

“Many social scientists, including anthropologists, have been interested in the power inherent in gender relations, often described through the idiom of female oppression. It can be argued that men usually tend to exert more power over women than vice versa. In most societies, men generally hold the most important political and religious positions, and very often men control the formal economy. In some societies, it may even be prescribed for women to cover their body and face when they appear in the public sphere, and, paradoxically, these practices sometimes become more common as their societies become more modern. On the other hand, women are often capable of exerting considerable informal power, not least in the domestic sphere. Anthropologists cannot state unequivocally that women are oppressed before they have investigated all aspects of their society, including how the women (and men) themselves perceive their situation. One cannot dismiss the possibility that certain women in western Asia (the Middle East) see the ‘liberated’ western woman as more oppressed – by professional career pressure, demands to look good and other expectations – than themselves.
When studying societies undergoing change, which perhaps most anthropologists do today, it is important to look at the value conflicts and tensions between different interest groups that are particularly central. Often these conflicts are expressed through gender relations.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

William Quan Judge photo
Raewyn Connell photo
Raymond Williams photo

“It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns.”

Raymond Williams (1921–1988) philosopher

"The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament" (1980), in Resources of Hope (1989).

Raymond Williams photo
Alexander Calder photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Darko Miličić photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
David Sedaris photo
Henry Ford photo
Eduard Bernstein photo

“We may think as we like theoretically, about man’s freedom of action, we must practically start from it as the foundation of the moral law, for only under this condition is social morality possible.”

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) German politician

Source: "Evolutionary Socialism" (1899) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm, Chapter III, The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy

Immanuel Kant photo
William Cobbett photo
Masaaki Imai photo
Arun Shourie photo

“Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite – ... But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices – ... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony.
This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered; the temples and idols in which they were enshrined; the texts they held sacred; the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit; and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The other component of the same exercise was to prop up the parts – the non-Hindus, the regional languages, the castes and groups which they calculated would be the most accessible to the missionaries and the empire – the innocent tribals, the untouchables.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

“How do you speak that all men may hear you in their own tongues? It is an art known and practiced by teachers of old.”

Desmond Leslie (1921–2001) British pilot, film maker, writer, and musician

The Amazing Mr. Lutterworth (1958)

Wendell Berry photo
Patañjali photo

“The peace of the chitta (or mind stuff) can be brought about through the practice of sympathy, tenderness, steadiness of purpose, and dispassion in regard to pleasure or pain, or towards all forms of good or evil.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect : a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Benjamin Creme photo
Raquel Welch photo

“Bikinis, as well as being empowering, they are just so darn comfortable and practical – at the beach or for fighting dinosaurs.”

Raquel Welch (1940–2023) American actress

Quoted by many sites https://tip-shack.com/2020/04/29/luke-i-am-your-father-and-other-famous-misquotes/ and blogs https://authorjoannereed.net/life-is-better-in-a-bikini/ as a comment made by Raquel Welch during the filming of 1 Million Years BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Years_B.C.#Release
Misattributed

Jacy Reese photo

“It’s the global food system that’s broken, not just the practices of any one country. A global problem requires a united global effort, and China could easily take the lead.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[China Could Become the Lab Meat Capital of the World, August 26, 2018, LiveKindly, https://www.livekindly.co/china-lab-meat-capital-world/]

Benjamin Creme photo
Alice A. Bailey photo

“The peace of the chitta (or mind stuff) can be brought about through the practice of sympathy, tenderness, steadiness of purpose, and dispassion in regard to pleasure or pain, or towards all forms of good or evil.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

“The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 46, p. 358

Masanobu Fukuoka photo
Patañjali photo

“One becomes firmly established in practice only after attending to it for a long time, without interruption and with an attitude of devotion.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

Patanjali in Ashtanga Yoga Sutra I.14, in Ashtanga Yoga: Practice & Philosophy http://books.google.co.in/books?id=f9ygWu2xM3QC&pg=PA154, p. 154.

Gregory Pardlo photo

“I’m interested in coaching, modeling, and teaching various writing practices and less in discovering talent. I want students to develop their own unique writing practices rather than impose my aesthetic values from the top down…”

Gregory Pardlo (1968) American writer

On his teaching process in “Gregory Pardlo: How I Write” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/gregory-pardlo-how-i-write/ in The Writer (2019 Jul 17)

Nagarjuna photo

“Due to having faith one relies on the practices,
Due to having wisdom one truly knows.
Of these two wisdom is the chief,
Faith is its prerequisite.”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

The Precious Garland, 5

trans. by Jeffrey Hopkins, "Buddhist Advice for Living and Liberation: Nagarjuna's Precious Garland" (1998), ISBN 1559398515
Major attributed works, Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland)

Ho Chi Minh photo

“In practice, the enemy has been making much more propaganda for us than we have ourselves.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

Instructions Given at the Conference (Fall 1950)
1950's

Walter Reuther photo

“You cannot save democracy in a vacuum of idealism. You have got to be motivated by idealism, but you have got to also be fighting the hard problem of practical politics.”

Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader

Statement to the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, Washington, D.C., October 9, 1956, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 170
1950s, Statement to the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections (1956)

Walter Reuther photo

“The struggle against racial intolerance and racial discrimination and bigotry must be waged everywhere in the world wherever such immoral and ugly practices exist.”

Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader

Address before the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, India, April 5, 1956, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 141
1950s, Address before the Indian Council on World Affairs (1956)

“The study and practice of poetry can equip you to 'boldly go where no man has gone before,' but it's not enough to go there—you have to be able to bear witness. Without witnessing, experience dissolves into nothing.”

Ariana Reines (1982) American writer

On the practice of poetry in “Ariana Reines Knows That Not All Surrender Is Bad” https://nylon.com/ariana-reines-sand-book-interview in Nylon Magazine (2019 Oct 15)

Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Bhagawan Nityananda photo
Ibn Hazm photo

“May God make us amongst those he allows to do good, and to practice it, and those who see the right path as none of us is without weakness; whosoever sees his weakness will forget those of others. May God make us die in the faith of Muhammad. Amen, Oh Master of the Universes.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibn Hazm's style of ending a work, in Salim al-Hassani, Ibn Hazm’s Philosophy and Thoughts on Science https://muslimheritage.com/ibn-hazm-philosophy-and-science/#_ftnref23

Ibn Hazm photo
Ibn Hazm photo
Luís de Camões photo

“But an old man of venerable look
(Standing upon the shore amongst the crowds)
His eyes fixed upon us (on ship-board), shook
His head three times, overcast with sorrow's clouds:
And (straining his voice more, than well could brook
His aged lungs: it rattled in our shrouds)
Out of a science, practice did attest,
Let fly these words from an oraculous breast:O glory of commanding! O vain thirst
Of that same empty nothing we call fame!”

Stanzas 94–95 (tr. Richard Fanshawe); the Old Man of Restelo.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto IV
Original: (pt) <p>Mas um velho d'aspeito venerando,
Que ficava nas praias, entre a gente,
Postos em nós os olhos, meneando
Três vezes a cabeça, descontente,
A voz pesada um pouco alevantando,
Que nós no mar ouvimos claramente,
C'um saber só de experiências feito,
Tais palavras tirou do experto peito:</p><p>Ó glória de mandar! Ó vã cobiça
Desta vaidade, a quem chamamos Fama!</p>O glory of commanding! O vain thirst
Of that same empty nothing we call fame!

Harry Gordon Selfridge photo
Edmund Burke photo
Edmund Burke photo
Helena Roerich photo
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Mary Winsor photo
John F. Kennedy photo