Being Pragmatic Quotes & Sayings

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. — Walt Disney Company

I'm a very pragmatic soul. I'm part of the business and I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to being an over-believer in spiritual or in paranormal matters. — Jane Anderson

As a liberal, I am morally obligated to be pragmatic. What good do I do poor people, elderly people, people who are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation if I'm not realistic about accomplishing something. — Barney Frank

Like it or not, I've come to appreciate soccer. Any kid can play, which fits with the inclusive agenda of progressive schools. Although the corollary to 'any kid can play' is that every kid must play because there is an iron grip to the warm hug of progressive inclusionism. — P. J. O'Rourke

For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic. — Shimon Peres

For the longest time I couldn't understand the meaning of the cliche "being compatible" - whether about a lover, colleague, team mate or friend. I now get it. There is so much more behind this superficial nauseatingly-pragmatic diplomatic phrase
it goes deep down to the true essence of someone, how they see the world, how they see and position themselves, how prepared/capable they are to back you, whether they can understand who you are and if they are prepared to break walls for you. Anything else is details. — Iveta Cherneva

DSM-5 is not 'the bible of psychiatry' but a practical manual for everyday work. Psychiatric diagnosis is primarily a way of communicating. That function is essential but pragmatic - categories of illness can be useful without necessarily being 'true.' The DSM system is a rough-and-ready classification that brings some degree of order to chaos. It describes categories of disorder that are poorly understood and that will be replaced with time. Moreover, current diagnoses are syndromes that mask the presence of true diseases. They are symptomatic variants of broader processes or arbitrary cut-off points on a continuum. — Joel Paris

It's really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there. — Mark Zuckerberg

Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons. — William James

However pragmatic you are, it is very demanding being a new parent. — Robert Winston

When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble. — Robert Anton Wilson

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic. — Gunnar Myrdal

If you give up on your principles I don't think that's being pragmatic ... Doing the wrong thing, even partially, isn't being practical ... if you have the right ideas and are forceful enough ... I think you can get the support you need. — Ron Paul

I started, you know, to work as a diplomat during the Soviet days, and in spite of ideology being very high on the Communist Party agenda, I can assure you that in practical terms, we have always been trying to be pragmatic. — Sergei Lavrov

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being. — George Saunders

Even when I went to the playground, I never picked the best players. I picked guys with less talent, but who were willing to work hard and had the desire to be great. — Magic Johnson

As an actress, the joy of being able to play the three sides of any woman, which are the glamour, the pragmatic and the one not to be messed with, is pretty glorious. — Victoria Smurfit

My dark secrets are life threatening. Pockets of unhappiness set in aspic that build and build. I have this primitive feeling that if something good happens, it is going to be followed by something bad. There is always a price to pay. — Sue Townsend

But I also am pragmatic. Sometimes not doing something is a violence because you're complicit in whatever injustices your government is engaged in. By being passive, you're being violent. — Sarah Lilton

Torkie Macleod has always regarded himself as a realist. He doesn't believe in life after death or divine reward or resurrection. He doesn't even believe in leaving a legacy, insofar as anything of that nature, good or bad, is completely insignificant to the one who is dead. Torkie's pragmatic philosophy has always been to make the most of his limited time alive, which for him means not striving for fame or riches, not ticking off a list of famous destinations, not indulging in any death-defying feats, and certainly not raising a family to "carry on his name." to Torkie Macleod, realist, life means making decent money with limited effort, hanging around with cool people, not being bossed around by anyone, and ingesting any mind-altering substance he chooses without a scintilla of shame or regret. — Anthony O'Neill

I am not against being pragmatic, because it is pragmatic to make a good pass, not a bad one. If I have the ball, what do I do with it? Could anybody argue that a bad solution like just kicking it away is pragmatic just because, sometimes, it works by accident? — Arsene Wenger

Humans are the world's greatest treasure — Sunday Adelaja

The other problem is that the priority of many soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan is operational security: not getting killed. Now that is a very valid priority, but it has to be balanced against many other priorities, especially not killing too many locals in the process. — Yaroslav Trofimov

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It's a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness - not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves. Such — Krista Tippett

Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities. — Andrei Tarkovsky

To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it? — Shusaku Endo

I don't think there are answers. I think there are thoughts. — Muriel Cooper

But I think the children of actors share a certain pragmatic approach. One is denied some of that 'running away with the circus' element of being an actor. — Toby Jones

The principle that every people, insofar as it is possible, must be allowed to live as they want is not based on any notions of cultural relativism, in which all ways of doing things are viewed as being of equal value for all peoples, everywhere.
It is, instead, strictly pragmatic: war and revolutions are without exception worse than the alternative, which is simply to leave the development of each society to the people who are actually living there.
For this reason we should not wage wars or foment revolutions and otherwise subvert the established orders in others' lands.
In return for this direct opposition to intervention and violence against cultures and peoples, we demand the same for ourselves. Mass immigration to Europe must cease. — Daniel Friberg

As calls rang out the world over for new treaties and organizations to be established with the intent of preventing future wars, America and her allies took a more realistic approach to the problem - we maintained allied military bases across Europe and Asia and we stationed troops in these foreign territories on a permanent basis. We weren't invaders or conquerors and for sure we had no intention of being an empire. We were liberators. That's all. But having fought and sacrificed so much and for so long, the pragmatic thing to do was to follow this simple philosophy: it's great to have dialogue, it just works a lot better when you have a strong military strategically placed and ready to act around the globe. — Tucker Elliot