Practicals Quotes - Page 36

• I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.

  Sylvia Plath

  Mother, Selfless, World

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.98, Anchor

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• Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

  Aldous Huxley

  Freedom, Brave New World, Views

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

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• They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Fundamentals, Politician

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• [M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

  C. S. Lewis

  Strong, Philosophy, Thinking

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• When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Eye, Differences, Way

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• During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks.

  Max Brooks

  Wall, Book, Flames

  Max Brooks (2003). “The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead”, p.186, Broadway Books

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• It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Ideas, Principles, Jeeves

  P.G. Wodehouse (2017). “Classic Wodehouse”, p.334, Random House

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• The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Mean, Here I Am, People

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• But why must everything have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years - working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty? In this dark period of loss, did I need any justification for learning Italian other than that it was the only thing I could imagine bringing me any pleasure right now?

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Loss, Dark, Italian

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.24, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.

  Russell Baker

  Half, Firsts, Educator

  Russell Baker (1991). “There's a Country in My Cellar”, Avon Books

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• But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.

  J. D. Salinger

  Karma, Running, Mean

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• Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

  Aristotle

  Philosophy, Mean, Men

  Aristotle (1953). “Ethics: The Nicomachean Ethics”

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• Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.

  Philip K. Dick

  Real, War, Ideas

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “VALIS”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I’ll admit that my garden now grows hope in lavish profusion, leaving little room for anything else. I suppose it has squeezed out more practical plants like caution and common sense. Still, though, hope does not flourish in every garden, and I feel thankful it has taken root in mine.

  Sharon Kay Penman

  Taken, Garden, Roots

  Sharon Kay Penman (2009). “The Reckoning”, p.430, Macmillan

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• Non-violence means dialogue, using our language, the human language. Dialogue means compromise; respecting each other’s rights; in the spirit of reconciliation there is a real solution to conflict and disagreement. There is no hundred percent winner, no hundred percent loser—not that way but half-and-half. That is the practical way, the only way.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Real, Mean

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• It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Kindness, Thinking, Looks

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• It's so kind of you to want to visit me in my loneliness. - The Wicked Witch of the West. Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking. - The Tin Woodsman Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

  L. Frank Baum

  Loneliness, Heart, Wicked

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• But just now, he'd gotten on his knees and proposed marriage, like in a television commercial for a diamond ring. Except of course they had the roll of duct tape instead, which, when you came to think about it, was a far more practical item. Such a bad mistake it would be, to embark on marriage and adult life without a nice supply of duct tape.

  Nancy Werlin

  Mistake, Nice, Thinking

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• In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Reality, Keys, House

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2014). “Gabriel Garcia Marquez Ebook Library”, p.332, Penguin UK

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• Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

  Karl Marx

  Men, Class, Age

  Karl Marx, Frederick Engels (2005). “The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document”, p.19, Haymarket Books

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• It gave her a feeling of her own power, to make something practical and beautiful just by using her own skill and creativity. It inspired her.

  Kate Jacobs

  Beautiful, Creativity, Skills

  Kate Jacobs (2008). “The Friday Night Knitting Club”, p.57, Penguin

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• A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

  William Faulkner

  Past, Simple, Men

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• Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Nihilism, Quality

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012). “The Idiot (Vintage Classics)”, p.326, Vintage

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• 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

  Wall, Distance, Differences

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• I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Sweaters, People, Feelings

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