Quotes About Practicality

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Buy only what you really need and cannot do without," President Harry Truman once said on TV.

No more good must be attempted than the people can bear.

Americans tend to overanalyze. Like during the space race, NASA spent fifty thousand dollars developing a zero-gravity pen that didn't skip. Know what the Russians did? Pencil. Think about

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.

I don't cook fancy every day. I don't think anybody can, nor would it be very good for you.

I try not to shoot unnecessarily or spend on extra expenses that normally happen on a film set - like actors' fees.

What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.

The Essence of Knowledge is, having it, to use it.

They're not any smarter than they have to be and they're just as smart as they need to be.

Take my advice Meggie: Never develop a passion you can't afford!

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess.

A physicist is one who's concerned with the truth," he later said. "An engineer is one who's concerned with getting the job done.

I was originally supposed to become an engineer," he later wrote a friend, "but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. Thinking for its own sake, like music!"72

Instead, Franklin found "a good and faithful helpmate" who was frugal and practical and devoid of pretensions, traits that he later noted were far more valuable to a rising tradesman.

he was practical about what he wanted in a wife. Deborah was rather plain, but she offered the prospect of comfort and domesticity.

In addition to such topics of debate, Franklin laid out a guide for the type of conversational contributions each member could usefully make. There were twenty-four in all, and because their practicality is so revealing of Franklin's purposeful approach, they are worth excerpting at length:

He said that a men's work cloths are the only real cloths he has.

I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

wishing makes dreams come true only in Disney movies; it's poison in business.

The building was old. A more prosperous community would have torn it down years ago, but Ice Islanders just kept fixing it, making do. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that good teachers and not fancy buildings were the key to a solid education. A teacher needed books, a blackboard, chalk, and a classroom. Period. The function of the building was to keep the students warm and dry; anything else would be extravagant.

Girls' handbags have enough to make a survival kit for Antarctica.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.