Pragmatists Quotes & Sayings

No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. — Alan Perlis

The tricky thing becomes: Do you know yourself well enough to then portray that on screen? And for me, I find that really hard. I'd rather hide behind accents and funny walks. — Joel Edgerton

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty. — Charles Sanders Peirce

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes. — Christopher Lasch

We've had enough of pragmatists and self-seeking risk-takers. We need people of character. — N. T. Wright

There is no plan ... You need to make smart choices, But you can make career decisions for two different types of reasons.
You can do something for instrumental reasons
because you think it's going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it's worthwhile ... or you can do something for fundamental reasons
because you think it's inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to.
The dirty little secret is that insturmental reasons usually don't work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what' going to happen. So you end up stuck. The most successful people
not all of the time, but most of the time
make decisions for fundamental reasons.
They take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place
even if they don't know exactly where it will lead. They're not fools. They're enlightened pragmatists. — Daniel H. Pink

I endeavor to make the most of everything. — Victoria Woodhull

Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I wonder which YOU are. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles! — Bill Watterson

I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist. — Will Self

Great leaders are pragmatists who can deal with difficult realities but still have the optimism and courage to act. — Nitin Nohria

We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different. — Neil Gaiman

Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. Pragmatists may deplore this as crude determinism, as another vain attempt to construct a general theory of history. They should reflect on the sort of political philosophy and structures we might now adhere to had the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Bonaparte, Hitler, Stalin or his heirs prevailed in the titanic world struggles of the past four centuries. — Peter Padfield

You're fourteen years old. You've only had that hair for fourteen years and you want to change it already! How bored are you going to be with it by the time you are thirty? What color will you be up to by then? — Louise Rennison

A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams. — Azar Nafisi

Visionaries light the way. Pragmatists lead the way. — Edward L. Cote

Optimists envision the best that could happen.
Pessimists envision the worst that could happen.
Pragmatists envision the likely to happen.
The pessimist finds many reasons to quit.
The optimist finds many reasons to keep going. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Through me the way into the city of woe: Through me the way into eternal pain: Through me the way among the lost. Justice moved my maker on high Divine power made me, Wisdom supreme, and primeval Love. Before me nothing was but things eternal And eternal I endure. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. — Kenan Malik

Love will push every button, try every faith, challenge every strength, trigger every weakness, mock every value, and then leave you there to die. And then you will be ready to be born at last, to become a soul who is strong enough to take love on. You'll be a romantic mystic who has achieved the elements: you endured the flames of love, you were baptized in the waters of love, and now you can soar like only a mystic can through the skies and skin of a lover's heart. — Marianne Williamson

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly - how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans? The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism. — Donna Tartt

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions. — Richard Rorty

Nowhere beats the heart so kindly as beneath the tartan plaid! — William Edmondstoune Aytoun

Pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm. — Jane Fonda

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical. — Adam Phillips

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. — Steven Pinker

Pragmatists fear losing the body. Idealists fear losing the soul. It's the soul of Ireland that's at risk, Piggy. For goddsakes, the country is becoming fuckin' Paddyland. Planet Ireland. Every castle and historic site has a ticket booth and fence thrown around it. Where's the giant mouse with the green ears? He can't be long away, is he, Piggy?" Des — D.P. Costello

I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism. — Vernon A. Walters

If one mistreats citizens of foreign countries, one infringes upon one's duty toward one's own subjects; for thus one exposes themto the law of retribution. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists. — Brian Ferneyhough

Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. — Donna Tartt

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen. — Carlos Fuentes

Love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it. — Stephen King

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. — Gilbert K. Chesterton