192 Practice Quotes

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness ... the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

This new form of activity medicine I could not represent to myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice.

In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

It is easy to love one's enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life.

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

I refer to my hands, feet and body as the tools of the trade. The hands and feet must be sharpened and improved daily to be efficient.

Practice all movements slow and fast, soft and hard; the effectiveness of Jeet Kune-Do depends on split-second timing and reflexive action, which can be achieved only through repetitious practice.

Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

One more thing: don't spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy!

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Religion? Yes, I know it well; I've heard its prayers and creeds, And seen men put them all to shame with poor, half-hearted deeds. They follow Christ, but far away; they wander and they doubt. I'll serve him in a better way, and live his precepts out.

If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

Basic anatomy. That has got to be the ongoing frustration: Why can't my fingers do what I want them to do? Not being able to play what I hear in my head - that is the ultimate source of frustration.

When you hear something you don't like, don't ever play it again.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

To love God in the most practical way is to love our fellow beings. If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones, we love God.

There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.

In deep meditation the flow of concentration is continuous like the flow of oil.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.

[If] you don't have any soul and you don't have any talent, jazz is what you should do. ... any fool can do it; all you gotta do is practice.

Let us worship the spirit in spirit, standing on spirit. Let the foundation be spirit, the middle spirit, the culmination spirit.

Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are ...but unless you realize the Truth, there is no freedom.

We must be bright and cheerful. Long faces do not make religion. Religion should be the most joyful thing in the world, because it is the best.

Work and worship are necessary to take away the veil, to lift off the bondage and illusion.

There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.

If you merely read this book you will not reach the Way of strategy. Absorb the things written in this book. Do not just read, memorise or imitate, but so that you realise the principle from within your own heart study hard to absorb these things into your body.

You can know how to win through strategy with the long sword, but it cannot be clearly explained in writing. You must practise diligently in order to understand how to win.

There are various kinds of spirit involved in letting go the hilt. There is the spirit of winning without a sword. There is also the spirit of holding the long sword but not winning. The various methods cannot be expressed in writing. You must train well.

I would sing in the mirror, holding a brush to my mouth like it was a microphone. The neighbors would always be complaining about how loud I was singing.

Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint-they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.

All of our divine duties are blessings of God but we think they are obligations.

Islam has said everything, but the difficulty rests with the Muslims.

My Mum was Jewish. Maybe I'm a really bad Jew because I'm always so excited to say that I am, but I don't live and breathe the religion.

We must overcome difficulty by constant practice. We must learn that nothing can happen to us unless we make ourselves susceptible to it.

Religion does not mean just precepts, a temple, monastery, or other external signs, for these as well as hearing and thinking are subsidiary factors in taming the mind. When the mind becomes the practices, one is a practitioner of religion, and when the mind does not become the practices one is not.

This last statement is a traditional form of the Bodhisattva vows.

Spiritual practice is difficult in the beginning. You wonder how on earth you can ever do it. But as you get used to it, the practice gradually becomes easier. Do not be too stubborn or push yourself too hard. If you practice in accord with your individual capacity, little by little you will find more pleasure and joy in it. As you gain inner strength, your positive actions will gain in profundity and scope.

Good-breeding, or true politeness, is the art of showing men by external signs the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by good company. It must be acquired by practice and not by books.

The odd time something happens and you go into some kind of enchantment (on stage). But you have to work very hard to get that. Most of the time you're just playing and singing the songs, and there's no guarantee that you are going to get anywhere....

Ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis paulatim.

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.

Countess: You are a great lover! Boris: I practice a lot when I'm alone.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

If you want to see how good you can become, you have to go somewhere you can play year-round. We hit balls in a dome in college. That's not the best way to develop your game.

I believe that our Tibetan ability to combine spiritual qualities with a realistic and practical attitude enables us to make a special contribution, in however modest a way. This is my hope and prayer. In conclusion, let me share with you a short prayer which gives me great inspiration and determination:

Sir Timothy was a fluent speaker, and when there was nothing to be said was possessed of a great plenty of words. And he was gifted with that peculiar power which enables a man to have the last word in every encounter,-a power which we are apt to call repartee, which is in truth the readiness which comes from continual practice. You shall meet two men of whom you shall know the one to be endowed with the brilliancy of true genius, and the other to be possessed of but moderate parts, and shall find the former never able to hold his own against the latter. In a debate, the man of moderate parts will seem to be greater than the man of genius. But this skill of tongue, this glibness of speech is hardly an affair of intellect at all. It is,- as is style to the writer,- not the wares which he has to take to market, but the vehicle in which they may be carried. Of what avail to you is it to have filled granaries with corn if you cannot get your corn to the consumer? Now Sir Timothy was a great vehicle, but he had not in truth much corn to send.

Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice

You're very good at this. Practice a little more, so it doesn't sound memorized, and speeches like that will make your fortune, I promise you

I believe that our Tibetan ability to combine spiritual qualities with a realistic and practical attitude enables us to make a special contribution, in however modest a way. This is my hope and prayer. In conclusion, let me share with you a short prayer which gives me great inspiration and determination:

4: We must repeat!

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

'It is by acts and not by ideas that people live. '

I think it's quite painfully obvious when someone's practicing through an amp, as opposed to someone who's really laying down some stuff that just happens to be fast.

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness ... the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our daily lives. If we find we cannot help others, the least we can do is to desist from harming them.

No battle can be won in the study, and theory without practice is dead.

Exercises cultivated self-reliance - the foundation of courage.

Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.

But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.

All religion relates to life, and the life of religion is to do good.

I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems - forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.

The uncertainty lies always in the intellectual region, never in the practical.

There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.

The practice of 'reviewing'... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another.

When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer - you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission.

Abstract propositions should never be discussed by a legislative body.

Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice; and yet everybody is content to hear.

Beware, lastly, of imagining you shall obtain the end without using the means conducive to it. God can give the end without any means at all; but you have no reason to think He will. Therefore constantly and carefully use all those means which He has appointed to be the ordinary channels of His grace. Use every means which either reason or Scripture recommends, as conducive (through the free love of God in Christ) either to the obtaining or increasing any of the gifts of God. Thus expect a daily growth in that pure and holy religion which the world always did, and always will, call 'enthusiasm;' but which, to all who are saved from real enthusiasm, from merely nominal Christianity, is 'the wisdom of God, and the power of God;' the glorious image of the Most High; 'righteousness and peace;' a 'fountain of living water, springing up into everlasting life!'

A religion of fulfilment must provide bustling secular man with contacts with all that is permanent and enduring, with the deeper and higher aspects of existence; indeed, with every possible opportunity of transcending the limitations not only of his day-by-day existence in the equivalents of shared worship, but of his little secular self in acts of meditation and self-examination and in retreats from the secular world of affairs.

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

I come to eat with very important people in the world, and I say 'only kosher', and always with a skullcap. I don't recall that my business ever suffered from that.

'It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.' (p. 8)

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either. (p. 25)

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.' (217)

His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves. (p. 131)

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

'His historic talent was backed up by extraordinary erudition. Behind his wizardry with the eyes lay sustained practice undertaken with devotion and discipline' - L.S Rajagopalan (noted art critic)[16]

'for 90 years' - On asking how much years he had studied Kutiyattam. He was 90 years then.

El modo de dar una vez en el clavo es dar cien veces en la herradura.

If you make sweet love with a school teacher / You'll have an amazing night / She'll do it and do it and do it again / Until you get it right.

This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.