Practical Pragmatic Quotes & Sayings

Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye - an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It's not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big. — Noah Hawley

Some of the published news was distorted, but distortion is inherent in partisan journalism, the same as it is in political rallies. — E.B. White

Bring real and practical life experience to the people — Sunday Adelaja

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain? — Stanislaw Lem

The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China's is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical "deliverable" items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively familiar to Americans. China — Henry Kissinger

The three branches of somaesthetics: the analytic study of the body's role in perception, experience, and action and thus in our mental, moral, and social life; the pragmatic study of methodologies to improve our body-mind functioning and thus expand our capacities of self-fashioning; and the practical branch that investigates such pragmatic methods by testing them on our own flesh in concrete experience and practice. — Richard Shusterman

A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history. On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic and social institutions, a holy force - the power of wisdom and love in action - is born. This force I define as Sacred Activism. — Andrew Harvey

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

I like the dream, like fantasy dresses. Women can dream at 9 in the morning and at 10 o'clock at night, it doesn't matter. I think it is also important for me to make it pragmatic and practical and wearable. I always say, 'If you can't eat it, it's not food, and if you can't wear it, it's not fashion, it is something else.' — Alber Elbaz

Patrick sort of had a very pragmatic, practical, Ed-like approach and went down to see. — Vera Farmiga

There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place. — Michael Pollan

Old liars
hold lies. — Toba Beta

Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist. — Elizabeth Gould Davis

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

When I first was exposed to Buddhism in the mid-1960s, I said it was so practical and utterly pragmatic. That's what attracted me to Buddhism. — Joan Halifax

There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want. — Hillary Clinton

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

There wasn't very much going on in London about five years ago, and I just took a ticket on spec and went to Los Angeles. I think it was in my second week that I auditioned for 'Battlestar.' — James Callis

Live your life as a practical example to others — Sunday Adelaja

Susan Orlean

I guess it's probably safer to be this way bout clothing than men or religion or something that could be really dangerous. I'm quite pragmatic about other choices in my life, but with clothing I'm a romantic - I abandon myself completely and the practical side get trumped. I become a zealot. — Emily Spivack

were in need of bodywork. It had always amused — Alexander McCall Smith

My mother was pragmatic, focused and extremely, exceedingly practical, and she was the ultimate self-determining person. — Ursula Burns

We live and breathe words. — Cassandra Clare

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of. — Seth Lloyd

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

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

I have singular tastes. The Alexander Wright. He is tall, dark, handsome, unique, and heavenly. — Ashlan Thomas

There's not much that doesn't get me stoked. I love what I do and am so passionate about it that I get stoked on the simplest things - watching the sunrise, walking on the beach, going for a run through the forest or along the coast. One of my all time favorite things is surfing amazing waves with my family and best friends. — Sally Fitzgibbons

It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places ... who your translator is can mean a lot. — Peter Menzel

The purpose of this study is to offer a logical, practical, pragmatic proof of the existence of God from a purely scientific perspective. — John Clayton

The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. — William James

The big thing in favor of doing an editorial on the front page is that it would be a powerful signal of how concerned we are about guns. — Andrew Rosenthal

The fundamental question for the United States is how it can cooperate to help meet the basic needs of the people of the hemisphere despite the philosophical disagreements it may have with the nature of particular regimes. It must seek pragmatic ways to help people without necessarily embracing their governments. It should recognize that diplomatic relations are merely practical conveniences and not measures of moral judgment. — Nelson Rockefeller

When I make a new movie, I always get stuck with, "That's not an Oliver Stone film." But I don't know what to do about that except just move on. — Oliver Stone

One consequence of this formulation is that a physical principle that unites many smaller physical theories must autoomatically unite many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. This is precisely what string theory accomplishes. In fact, of all physical theories, string theory unites by far the largest number of branches of mathematics into a single coherent picture. Perhaps one of the by-products of the physicists' quest for unification will be the unification of mathematics as well. — Michio Kaku

The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," observed John Sanderson. "We demolish dinner, they eat it." The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was "in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce ... the lightest and most agreeable food." The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the "effect. — David McCullough