Quotes About Practice

Because learning takes practice, we are more likely to get things right at small stakes than at large stakes. This means critics have to decide which argument they want to apply. If learning is crucial, then as the stakes go up, decision-making quality is likely to go down.

Unfortunately, some of life's most important decisions do not come with many opportunities to practice. Most students choose a college only once. Outside of Hollywood, most of us choose a spouse, well, not more than two or three times. Few of us get to try many different careers.

Generally, the higher the stakes, the less often we are able to practice.

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.

At school we practiced for the Christmas program all month long. Miss Butler couldn't sing either, but she was a feisty director. . . . She took the Christmas program personally, as teachers do.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. "There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.

him. It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. "There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. p 101.

We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. There is no path toward love except by practicing love. War will always produce more war. Violence can never bring about true peace.

But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

But in this book, I use "prayer" as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.

Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer.

Both the church's practice and its Platonic pronouncements create tragic gaps for any person with an operative head and a beating heart. But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way.

Jesus is not telling us to believe unbelievable things, as if that would somehow please God. He is much more saying to us, "Try this," and you will see for yourself that it is true. But that initial trying is always a leap of faith into some kind of action or practice.

Let me sum it up this way: We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking. Without action and lifestyle decisions, without concrete practices, words are dangerous and largely illusory.

Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation.

Christianity is much more about living and doing than thinking.

spirituality" which means that things are only found to be true in the doing of them.

Jesus himself says, "Do not believe those who say 'Lord, Lord' " (Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, italics added). He says it is those who "do it right" that matter, not those who "say it right." Yet verbal orthodoxy has been Christianity's preoccupation, at times even allowing us to burn people at the stake for not "saying it right.

for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: "The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better." I