Practical Living Quotes & Sayings

It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion. — John Ruskin

My song are more about the practical message of not wearing ourselves out just to get rich and looking at what life is really about and enjoying each and every day as opposed to the opposite of that. About living your life in a freer sense and not being bound by what people think of you and looking forward to seeing the grander scheme of who God is, what He's done and what He's doing and what He'd going to do. — Peter Furler

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs. — Wendell Berry

Follow your passion was not the message I heard growing up. Instead, I was told that the practical realities of surviving "in the real world" were far more important than any person living a "sheltered life" such as my own could imagine. I was warned that overly idealistic dreams of "finding something I loved" could in fact be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment. — Angela Duckworth

Go Green, Live Rich is the ultimate toolkit for greening the planet and our wallets at the same time. No one does a better job than David Bach in showing us the practical strategies for how to enjoy living sustainably. — Terry Tamminen

And eventually I realized that being in love is not living a life in fairy tale.. I woke up, not with a kiss but with a twinge.. Hello real world.. teach me now.. how to be practically real and really practical.. — Himmilicious

There may be the kinds of things that you may find interesting, but then there's also the practical reality of needing to make a living and this is what you have to choose from. — Jeffrey Jones

Might it be that the Transition approach, of creating vibrant local economies with increased community ownership, meeting practical needs from as nearby as possible, and living well while consuming far less energy than we do today, could actually better meet our needs? — Rob Hopkins

I am writing this book so the doers, the drivers, and the hard
workers out there will have a Step-By-Step ultra-practical
guide that will teach the specific action steps one must take to
start and grow a successful business. If you take action and do
everything this book tells you to do, you will make millions. If
you just intend on doing everything in this book you will make
a mediocre living or you will be poor and it will be your own
fault. — Clay Clark

Being a feminist in principle is easy compared to being a feminist in practice. For men and women, living each day in practical defiance of thousands of years of gender-based streaming is so much harder than walking in marches, running workshops, and writing blog posts. It means questioning everything you do, moment by moment, day by day. It means thinking differently and making dozens of conscious decisions every day that you might have made on auto-pilot before. It's hard. It's taxing. It's tiring. — Terry Fallis

Art is not to do with the practical side of making a living. It's to live a fuller human life. — Henry Moore

To be guilty of the sin of prayerlessness is to be guilty of the worst form of practical atheism. It is actually saying we can get along without His help while the evidence is very clear on every hand that we cannot. Could it be that the sin of prayerlessness steams from our unbelief that he is a living God who exercises direct influence on the affairs of men? — Bruce Willis

Prayer for revival will prevail when it is accompanied by radical amendment of life; not before. All-night prayer meetings that are not preceded by practical repentance may actually be displeasing to God. "To obey is better than sacrifice." We must return to New Testament Christianity, not in creed only but in complete manner of life as well. Separation, obedience, humility, simplicity, gravity, self-control, modesty, cross-bearing: these all must again be made a living part of the total Christian concept and be carried out in everyday conduct. We — A.W. Tozer

I find that often simple words say all that needs to be said in less time, using less energy, with all the details wanted- fully in tact. Love it. — Sereda Aleta Dailey

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians. — Nikolai Berdyaev

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness - one where we feel our best and perform our best - it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living. — Steven Kotler

The biggest considerations I had were practical: how do you move such a large number of actors around a small space? So, for example, if I have to have the mother bring a pot of tea from the kitchen to the living room and serve it to the others, how do I, on a practical level, get everyone into the frame? Any decisions I made about the camera angles or movement came out of necessity, versus any sort of stylistic choice. — Hirokazu Koreeda

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences. — Che Guevara

The truth I love in loving my brother cannot be something merely philosophical and abstract. It must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive. And I mean these words in no metaphorical sense. The truth I must love in my brother is God Himself, living in him. I must seek the life of the Spirit of God breathing in him. And I can only discern and follow that mysterious life by the action of the same Holy Spirit living and acting in the depths of my own heart. — Thomas Merton

She stood, as it were, with her face to God and her back to the people, waiting to receive His word for the 'chose people.' She had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be. — Elisabeth Elliot

I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally the new immunology was born. This is a science which to me has far greater potentialities both for practical use in medicine and for the better understanding of living process than the classical immunochemistry which it is incorporating and superseding. — Frank Macfarlane Burnet

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man. — Fernando Pessoa

And what I like best in you is this particular enthusiasm, which is not at all practical or sensible, which is downright Quixotic. You are not altogether what you seem, and you have your reservations. Living among the wolves, you have not become one. — Willa Cather

There is a place for mind and mind knowledge. It is in the practical realm of day-to-day living. However, when it takes over all aspects of your life, including your relationships with other human beings and with nature, it becomes a monstrous parasite that, unchecked, may well end up killing all life on the planet and finally itself by — Eckhart Tolle

So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and double for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they. — Thomas Pynchon

When programs, methods, and money produce impressive results, there is an inclination to confuse human success with divine blessing. Christians can actually behave like practical humanists, living as if God were not necessary. When that happens, passionate longing for God and yearning for His help will be missing - along with His empowerment. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Living in a house where domestic violence goes on every day never feels like home. You don't have to suffer in silence. I'm giving my full support to this website as it will give proper and practical advice about what to do if you feel afraid. Remember, you're not alone. — Beverley Knight

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free. — William Deresiewicz

The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse. — Steven Pinker

I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress. — Hans Rosling

Embodying recapitulation as a practical application to one's path means not living the way you used to live, and being so completely in the moment that you are lost to yourself. — Lujan Matus

Faith may always be acquired. Whoso is devoid of faith, and desires to have it, may acquire it by living for a few days (sometimes for a few hours only) as though he already possessed it. It is by practical, not theoretical, religion, that men transform their lives. — William Batchelder Greene

Money doesn't matter on a deeply personal level. It doesn't make you feel any happier. But of course I am very aware that I don't have to worry about earning a living or about those very important practical things that most people have to worry about on a very real level. — Winona Ryder

Physics is now saying we might be living in one of an infinite number of parallel universes. We can learn practical and creative things to do with the information. — Robert Moss

I do believe that most men live lives of quiet desperation. For despair, optimism is the only practical solution. Hope is practical. Because eliminate that and it's pretty scary. Hope at least gives you the option of living. — Harry Nilsson

You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled. — Alice Munro

Racial injustice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with his scientific progress. And, more importantly, he will have learned the practical art of living in harmony. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character. — Hans Adolf Krebs

We sometimes think of saint, or of people who are living like saints, as being ethereal, living in a higher spiritual realm. But of ten enough they live in an even less ethereal way than the rest of us. They are more fully of this earth, more fully engaged in the dirty, practical problems of the people around them. — David Brooks

Nobody was perfect. Not even close. And everybody had wrinkles from smiling and squinting and craining their necks. Everybody has marks on their bodies from years of living- a trail of life left on them. Evidence of all the adventures and sleepless nights and practical jokes and heartbreaks that had made them who they are. — Katherine Center

Make a list of the work that inspires you. Don't be practical. Don't think about making a living; think about doing something you love. There's nothing that says you have to quit your day job to cultivate meaningful work. There's also nothing that says your day job isn't meaningful work - maybe you've just never thought of it that way. What's your ideal slash? What do you want to be when you grow up? What brings meaning to you? — Brene Brown

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative. — David Fleming

Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. — A.W. Tozer

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. - William James — Charles Duhigg

On a more practical level, anyone out there who wants to be a writer should clearly recognize that this is a brutal business, where even incredibly talented people sometimes never make a living. If you want to chase such a dream, please have a Plan B in place. — R.A. Salvatore

But to me the notion that spirituality is separate from the rest of life does not allow for a practical approach to living a life that has extraordinary quality. — Tony Robbins

It feels like home, far from home, yet homely. I have always been a fan of Delhi's practical life not that i have lived in an aspiration or yearning to make a living here, but delhi has always been on my soapbox. — Parul Wadhwa

Socialism is practical, in the best sense of the term; a living, vital force of inestimable value to society. — Daniel De Leon

The Bible knows nothing of any contrast between truth and experience, head and heart, theology and practical living. — Michael S. Horton

Living in the moment" all the time may not be practical if one lives for many years. Planning for the future confers benefits, especially financially. What may be good for a twenty-year plan might not be best for five years. It causes incredible tension . . . the uncertainty just becomes a part of your life. But it is tiring. I've thought, "I wish I could just get sick." I just didn't have the energy to keep living, waiting to get sick. It takes energy to be optimistic: I run out of steam. — Robert Klitzman

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn't superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer's superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action. — Fernando Pessoa

The state of New York had just one important advantage - an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation. — Bill Bryson

The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field. I cannot reap a kernel of the good. — Helen Keller

We've made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We've fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We've lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love's potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia - the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape - love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, "lovingkindness," carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself. — Krista Tippett

A practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living. — Mortimer J. Adler

...death does leave a daunting array of practical tasks: all those possessions that you were forced to leave behind had to be sorted and packed and redistributed in the living world. — Rosamund Lupton

Post-modern intellectuals have pronounced their historical judgment on America's past, finding it to be morally indefensible. Every great human achievement of the past - whether in philosophy, religion, literature, or the humanities - came to be understood as a kind of exploitation of the powerless. Rather than allowing the past to be viewed in terms of its aspirations and accomplishments, it has been judged by its failures. The living part of the past is understood in terms slavery, racism, and identity politics. Political correctness arose as the practical and necessary means of enforcing this historical judgment. No public defense of past greatness could be allowed to live in the present. Public morality and public policy would come to be understood in terms of the formerly oppressed. — John Marini

I highly recommend Marci Alboher's One Person/ Multiple Careers. It includes lots of practical strategies for living the slash. Malcom Gladwell is also a constant source of inspiration for me. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work - complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward - and that these can often be found in creative work.2 These criteria absolutely fit with what cultivating meaningful work means in the context of the Wholehearted journey. Last, I think everyone should read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist3 - I try to read it at least once a year. It's a powerful way of seeing the connections between our gifts, our spirituality, and our work (slashed or not) and how they come together to create meaning in our lives. — Brene Brown

TO be practical not merely means to steal when everybody steals but to act with wits and wisdom ... — Ranu Das

It's interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It's as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help. — Donald Miller

The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling. — Max Stirner

What is the next step, the practical application?
- I will answer that the
absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become
capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline
which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give. — Alan W. Watts

On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read. — Viggo Mortensen

The Bible does not deny that we were various things - addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators - but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _ and I am an X Y or Z." The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed. — Paul O'Brien

The greatest cost of the specialization of technological life - and out of which all other damages are birthed - is arguably our separation from the practical and enriching sense of ourselves as embodied beings. When we are alienated from the wisdom of the body, our lives become theoretical and abstract, and we are distanced from the direct, felt sense of living. — Richard Strozzi-Heckler

Ministry is when the people who hear you, don't want more of you; they want more of Him because of what you've said. When you point them to God's fire instead of trying to get attention for yourself-that's ministry. — Priscilla Shirer

Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimauxsledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and walrus on the ice. They are of sick and diseased imaginations who would toll the world's knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary sects do better than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other busy living men? The practical faith of all men belies the preacher's consolation. — Henry David Thoreau

Immortality was overrated, as far as he was concerned. Hardy had enough problems as it was; living forever sounded like a death sentence for someone with his practical sensibilities. — David S.E. Zapanta

Victory is the thought transformation resulting from comprehending that physical immortality ... perpetual longevity, sans illness and aging ... eternal, healthy, youthful life in your living flesh ... is not a fantasy, but a practical and attainable possibility. — Linda Goodman

If you want that splendid power in prayer, you must remain in loving, living, lasting, conscious, practical, abiding union with the Lord Jesus Christ. — Charles Spurgeon

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience. — Trofim Lysenko

The whole quality of your life depends on your state of mind. There are very high states of mind that very few people experience. They are also quite pragmatic and practical and they make you more efficient at living and working in the world. — Frederick Lenz

But it wasn't for him to judge whether the artists were good or not - other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as so many of them lived in a world that was deaf to practicalities. He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at: he considered them such successes, and he was proud of them. Unlike him, they had had no clear path to follow, and yet they had plowed stubbornly ahead. They spent their days making beautiful things. — Hanya Yanagihara

I consider Anarchism the most beautiful and practical philosophy that has yet been thought of in its application to individual expression and the relation it establishes between the individual and society. Moreover, I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. It is my conviction that dictatorship, whether to the right or to the left, can never work
that it never has worked, and that time will prove this again, as it has been proved before. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes more apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated. Considered from this point, a recrudescence of Anarchist ideas in the near future is very probable. When this occurs and takes effect, I believe that humanity will at last leave the maze in which it is now lost and will start on the path to sane living and regeneration through freedom. — Emma Goldman

The word "veganism" denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude - as far as is possible and practical - all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. — Donald Watson

To live the practical aspect of life as part of our schooling is formidable, but to adopt living it as our ultimate goal is absurd. — Samael Aun Weor

It's not a matter of the creature," explained Master Ulin, passionately. "It's a matter of their enneagrammatic remains, and what pathways you wish to exploit for the work. If an ordinant can transfer the pattern without the use of a benet, eschewing deracination of the living in favor of dissamuring from the enneagrammatic archive of the Grain with a suitably docimased bridewell, then both the ethical and practical issues of flagitation and paracletion are solved at once," he stated, triumphantly. "I have no idea what he just said," admitted Master Cormoran, drunkenly. "But damn, he said it well!" "It's — Terry Mancour

Ian Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He ... was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with the usual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that encapsulated the aspirations of the age, and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself. He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created ... Ian Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it ... To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality. — Henry Chancellor

I write so the endangered thoughts roaming naked and vulnerable through the misty jungles of my mind aren't slain by the guns of practical living. — Kim Krizan

Realizing that our minds control our bodies while our bodies reflect our minds amounts to understanding the most fundamental aspects of ourselves. It further equals a comprehension of the relationship between our "tools." And since the mind and body are interrelated, this understanding makes it easier to see why coordinating them is a practical way of using these tools to greatest effect - a way of using the mind and body to live our lives as art. — H.E. Davey

In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price-determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of apples or coal. And it is for that reason, rather than the practical details, that the broader political movement of which the demand for a living wage is the leading edge is ultimately doomed to failure: For the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away. — Paul Krugman

Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them. — Philip K. Dick