Quotes & Sayings About Practicality

I have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do. — David Byrne

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.
We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget. — G.K. Chesterton

One of the great benefits of being married is always having someone to tie one's tie. — Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful. — Criss Jami

A balance, I think, is needed , " Dr. Templeton said judiciously,"between the head and the heart: nothing easier to say: nothing harder to achieve. — Jude Morgan

Practicality is a difficult thing to find; it does not drop down from heaven. And for the last two hundred years we have been divorced from all practical life. Ideas, if you like, are fermenting, and desire for good exists, though it's in a childish form, and honesty you may find, although there are crowds of brigands. Anyway, there's no practicality. Practicality goes well shod. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There's no way you can shoot low-budget stuff on lots of locations. It's just a practicality thing because every time you move, it costs time and money. — Ben Wheatley

...a mini-hearse. It had the practicality of a mini-van and the handy carrying capacity of a hearse combined. If you get annoyed with your kids at soccer practice, you can always kill them on the way home and take them directly to the cemetery. — David David Katzman

The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks. — John Darnielle

While her own taste was, frankly, pedestrian, Lady Maccon did enjoy seeing what all the peacocks had arranged to drape themselves with. In the better parts of London, one could run into almost anything: the latest evening gowns from Paris, floating dresses to the extremes of practicality from the Americas, and the fullest, most complex cravat ties imaginable. One could witness a veritable cornucopia of visual delights merely by driving through the crowded streets. If — Gail Carriger

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

I believe I have stumbled on at least one possibility: if you are compelled to tell others virtually everything you learn from God, you might be a teacher! My friends who have other spiritual gifts can learn something from God without feeling the overwhelming need to share it with everyone they know. Not me! The second I receive the least spiritual insight or learn anything at all about the practicality of Scripture slapped on the hot pavement of real life, I want to make the world's biggest conference call. — Beth Moore

Her (Jane Austen) moral message is infused with ideological insistence on the merits of good conduct, good manners, sound reason, and marriage as an admirable social institution. She never scorns love, but balances it often . . . with a firm advocacy of . . . the qualities of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and practicality. — Andrew Sanders

I have found in my experience that expediency, whether it is practical or not, is an unreliable guide for behavior. Human behavior must be guided by a higher principle. Practicality has its place but only within a framework of values, which all men of good will share. — King Hussein I

Should my decease happen in Newcastle I desire that my remains may be laid near the south porch in Saint Andrews churchyard near the remains of my dear wife, and that the least possible expence may be laid out on my interment. Charles Avison — Charles Avison

A house should be a synthesis of comfort, practicality, and tradition. — Elsie De Wolfe

take care, in reading the writings of philosophers or hearing their speeches, that you do not attend to words more than things, nor get attracted more by what is difficult and curious than by what is serviceable and solid and useful. — Plutarch

It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating. — Stephen Bayley

Too many cold, hungry nights had taught her a special kind of practicality, but in that moment, she believed in his magic. — Laura Trentham

I don't think there's any one definition, but to do effective political work you have to have vision and practicality, and learn how to persuade people that what you feel needs to be done does need to be done. — Alan Cranston

For the young people here: practicality is a good thing. There are times where compromise is necessary. That's part of wisdom. But it's also important to hang on to what you believe. — Barack Obama

One who sees communication in wisdom should also see creativity and practicality in intelligence. — Anyaele Sam Chiyson

A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity ...
Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence.
(pg.115-116, "The Body and the Earth") — Wendell Berry

I'm not a leather kind of Dom when it comes to practicality. He Smiled " I'm much more a demin kind of Dom." Shayla arched her brow at him. " A demin Dom huh?" he nodded . " Better then a sweating-my-ass-off Dom. — Tymber Dalton

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel. — Florence Nightingale

Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It's as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives ... — Michael Leunig

And when you start talking about the practicality of winning a race like that - you've got to remember we're not talking about winning 51 percent of the vote. We're talking about winning 36, 37, 38 percent of the vote. — Hamilton Jordan

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night. — Philip K. Dick

Practicality continues to be a challenge for me - it's at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York - not a brilliant career or I'd still be doing it - but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance. — Debra Dean

Between Practicality and Spirituality lies Rationality!
And when the lessons 'appear', the 'intensity and clarity' can be jaw dropping ! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? - — R. Scott Bakker

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart. — Criss Jami

The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated. — Criss Jami

In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases. — David Pietrusza

Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues and in terms of the problems of history making. — C. Wright Mills

A business woman needs a successful mix of design and practicality. — Donatella Versace

She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. Ine modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy. — G.K. Chesterton

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality. — Theodor Adorno

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from. — David Whyte

Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing - very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can't drive? A lot. They're not practical. They are not capable in everyday life. — Ha Jin

My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicality! — Johannes Brahms

You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists, he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death. This is how it is - without cowardly illustrations. — Saul Bellow

It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well. — John Steinbeck

A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: "Yes, it's the old iambic tetrameter acalectic." It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practicality incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrachian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism ... . Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect ... is lost. — Charles P. Pierce

Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory. — Kenneth L. Pike

As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. — James Madison

Keep your section solvent, keep your job. — Michael Alexander

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. — Henry David Thoreau

Sure, she loves him. But they've got two different ideas of love. He wants to dance with her on a terrace with a full moon and a thirty-six-piece orchestra; he wants to go singing through storms with her, like Gene Kelly. She knows about thirty-six-piece orchestras. You have to feed them, and then there's nothing left for the children. — Peter S. Beagle

The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete. — Barbara Kingsolver

By going and coming, a bird weaves its nest. — Ashanti

If you have not even a little imagination, you are simply a brute. So you must not lower your ideal, neither are you to lose sight of practicality. We must avoid the two extremes ... You must try to combine in your life immense idealism with immense practicality. — Swami Vivekananda

The more you win a debate intellectually, the more you lose it practically. — Daya Kudari

Technology isn't what makes us "post-human" or "transhuman," as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It's what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning. — Nicholas Carr

And for once, I want you to snap out of that hidebound practicality that sucks all the joy out of life. Were you an Indian, your spirit name would be Dream Killer. — Elizabeth Camden

I was six years old when my mother died. For a long time afterward, the sweet and earthy magnolia scent of her would permeate my dreams. No matter what I was dreaming about, good or frightening, my mother's smell would waft through my nighttime adventures, infusing them with her unseen presence, reassuring me even through their darkest moments. I never told anyone about this. I felt that, somehow, my mother had found a way to communicate with me from heaven even though I knew from the down-to-earth practicality of my Baptist Sunday School lessons that it was likely impossible. Still, I have heard it said more than once that with God, nothing is impossible. Is it so hard to imagine that He, in His infinite compassion, might have, for a moment in time, comforted a scared little girl with her mother's familiar scent? — Earlene Fowler

Practicality requires that we stop somewhere in the process, but nothing actually says we can't keep on writing and revising. In fact, most writers continue to develop ideas and themes from one book to the next in what is essentially a lifelong evolution and revision. — Ralph L. Wahlstrom

I'll play a character who is getting married to a woman to avoid the draft. Ultimately they fall in love with each other, but at first it's only out of practicality. — Elijah Wood

I gave up on being Nice. I started putting more value on other qualities instead: passion, bravery, intelligence, practicality, humor, patience, fairness, sensitivity. Those — Anna Kendrick

A man must earn his daily bread by some means some-where, and if his bread fails to nourish his soul, at least his body will be nourished while his soul suffers. — Jose Saramago

Zealots are one-trick ponies. They love nothing so much as their own cause. Don't get in their way without expecting to be hurt. — Patricia Briggs

The timid practicality that is the major message that our kids absorb today is alibied-and camouflaged, and soothed-with a hollow commercialized rebellion. — William Deresiewicz

Sometimes it's best to trade an ideal for something more practical that you can guarantee. — A.J. Darkholme

If you find yourself pulled beyond all practicality toward doing something
writing poetry, building a business, restoring old cars, planting a secret garden; if at four in the morning the right word comes to you, the perfect flower to plant in that particular spot
you are playing your invisible instrument. — Joan Oliver Goldsmith

Hittite law emphasized restitution rather than revenge. Humankind lost a certain useful practicality when it chose the other Semitic response - never to forgive and never to forget. — Frank Herbert

I've always mistrusted that sort o' learning as leaves folks foolish and unreasonable about business. — George Eliot

Even though I'm a hype man myself, I like the practicality of it all. People who understand how to turn a profit. At the end of the day, this is still business so I'm looking for real practical knowledge of how to actually make money, not necessarily raise it. — Gary Vaynerchuk

The triumph of the analytical movement, which formed in the '30's and '40's, was precisely what earned the Soviet masters the acclaim of chessplayers the world over. Unfortunately, it must also be noted that, for today's chessmasters, the watchword is practicality. — Mikhail Botvinnik

Get crazy in prayer. Ask for the seemingly impossible; then watch it happen. Do not make judgments on what you are worthy of. Save the practicality for other aspects of your life. — Pooja Ruprell

Rupert: " ... At this rate, somebody is bound to upset the Warlock once too often, and we'll end up with a Court full of bemused looking toads."
"He wouldn't dare use his magic here," said the Champion.
"Don't bet on it," said Rupert. "The High Warlock has all the practicality and self-preservation instincts of a depressed lemming. — Simon R. Green

Knowledge is great, but what practical use is it if you can't put it into practice? — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. — Hilary Mantel

Much of what we acquire in life isn't worth dragging to the next leg of our
journey. Travel light. You will be better equipped to travel far. — Gina Greenlee

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers. — Peter Zumthor

For more than a year, he'd felt destined to marry Isabel Arundell; now, suddenly, he wasn't so sure. He loved her, that was certain, but he also resented her. He loved her strength and practicality but resented her overbearing personality and tendency to do things on his behalf without consulting him first; loved that she tolerated his interest in all things exotic and erotic but hated her blinkered Catholicism. Charles Darwin had killed God but she and her family, like so many others, still clung to the delusion. — Mark Hodder

The hour has arrived to abandon theories and go directly to what is practical. — Samael Aun Weor

I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world? — E.A. Bucchianeri

These heels are candy for the feet; they're for pleasure, not practicality. — Christian Louboutin

In that moment, Iseult knew what she had to do. Logic didn't matter, nor Threadwitch practicality, nor even the opposing halves of her heart.
What mattered was doing the right thing.
So Iseult made her choice, and she ran. — Susan Dennard

But Nicholas had no room for practicality when there was fun to be had. There was no one as capable of taking a seemingly innocuous situation and turning it into a raving adventure.
Jane. What a boring, and obviously fake, name. This oughta be fun. — Sarah M. Cradit

We are dreamers. We worship love, we hope against hope and toss practicality out the window. — Pete Wentz

Books and minds only work when they're open. — James Dewar

The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them. — Edith Hamilton

The shoes themselves were light green, with lowish heels (which were very important for comfort and walking; high heels were always a temptation, but, like all temptations, one paid for them later). — Alexander McCall Smith

Practicality is overrated. — Nicola Yoon

I love the practicality of a good car. You know what I mean? And when I say 'practicality,' I mean the complete practicality of a Ferrari 458, a wonderfully fantastic every day car. — Hunter Hayes

The creative tension with spirituality vs. practicality in the world of politics is a vital conversation. — Tim Daly

Either help or give up. Right now devil's advocate is just another name for asshole. — James S.A. Corey

Were practicality the explanation for my spontaneous hike, I could have sung my purpose that afternoon, 'Wanking in a Winter Wonderland. — Jim Provenzano

I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles. — David Hume

Dee checks to make sure his mic is turned off. 'It's not about common sense.' Dee surveys the crowd with some pride.

Dum also checks to make sure his mic is off. 'It's not about logic or practicality or anything that makes a remote amount of sense.' He sports a wide grin.

'That's the whole point of a talent show,' says Dee, doing a spin onstage. 'It's illogical, chaotic, stupid, and a whole hell of a lot of fun.' Dee nods to Dum. 'It's what sets us apart from monkeys. What other species puts on talent shows? — Susan Ee

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I'll still be questing after just that right combination of words. — Lauren Willig

Each of us seems to have a main focus, a particular idea of practicality - a concept of 'what we want out of life' against which we judge our experiences. — Jane Roberts

If you're not getting work, make your own work. I think that's a good mentality. I suppose I take my drive from my mother and my practicality from my father. — Sophie Kennedy Clark

Comfort, simplicity, practicality - these are all American words. It is simplicity in fabric and way of cut. You cannot produce complicated clothes or spend ten days making a dress. Mine is all done by scaling measurements. I use the body as the land, as when building a house. — Zoran

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall - that is my strength, my only strength. — Antonio Gramsci

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

I looked up. Mom looked down at me with the compassion/practicality combo that was her trademark. — MaryJanice Davidson

Spirituality is connected with practicality. — Choa Kok Sui