Practising Quotes

1. "Beckham is unusual. He was desperate to be a footballer. His mind was made up when he was nine or ten. Many kids think that it's beyond them. But you can't succeed without practising at any sport."
Author: Bobby Charlton

2. "In high school I was on the basketball team, but the coach did something I didn't dig and the next day he looked up and saw me practising with the football team."
Author: Charles Mingus

3. "So I did in fact spend two and a half years in the Middlesbrough car park practising skills. But if you spend four or five or six hours a day practising, you get better."
Author: Craig Johnston

4. "So for a year I spent all my time hiding from Jack Charlton in the car park practising my skills."
Author: Craig Johnston

5. "I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent."
Author: Daniel Tammet

6. "It would be dangerous territory if I wasn't practising what I preach which is to always accept responsibility, always accept the consequences of your actions."
Author: David Blunkett

7. "I was depressed as a child. I found it hard to make friends. My favourite thing was locking myself in the bathroom and practising comedy routines."
Author: David Walliams

8. "Democracy can only spring from practising it early, and democratic action was not to expected from young people brought up under a close authoritarian system."
Author: Dora Russell

9. "Solo For Ear-Trumpet The carriage brushes through the brightLeaves (violent jets from life to light);Strong polished speed is plunging, heavesBetween the showers of bright hot leavesThe window-glasses glaze our facesAnd jar them to the very basis — But they could never put a polishUpon my manners or abolishMy most distinct disinclinationFor calling on a rich relation!In her house — (bulwark built betweenThe life man lives and visions seen) — The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,And silence hisses like a snake — Invertebrate and rattling ache….Then suddenly EternityDrowns all the houses like a seaAnd down the street the Trump of DoomBlares madly — shakes the drawing-roomWhere raw-edged shadows sting forlornAs dank dark nettles. Down the hornOf her ear-trumpet I conveyThe news that 'It is Judgment Day!''Speak louder: I don't catch, my dear.'I roared: 'It is the Trump we hear!''The What?' 'THE TRUMP!' 'I shall complain!…. the boy-scouts practising again."
Author: Edith Sitwell

10. "He'd met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he'd been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who'd never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they'd just practised known techniques instead of learning to think creatively. (Harry was something of a sore loser.)"
Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

11. "I think I was enchantedWhen first a sombre Girl —I read that Foreign Lady** —The Dark — felt beautiful —And whether it was noon at night —Or only Heaven — at Noon —For very Lunacy of LightI had not power to tell —The Bees — became as Butterflies —The Butterflies — as Swans —Approached — and spurned the narrow Grass —And just the meanest TunesThat Nature murmured to herselfTo keep herself in Cheer —I took for Giants — practisingTitanic Opera —The Days — to Mighty Metres stept —The Homeliest — adornedAs if unto a Jubilee'Twere suddenly confirmed —I could not have defined the change —Conversion of the MindLike Sanctifying in the Soul —Is witnessed — not explained —'Twas a Divine Insanity —The Danger to be SaneShould I again experience —'Tis Antidote to turn —To Tomes of solid Witchcraft —Magicians be asleep —But Magic — hath an ElementLike Deity — to keep —"
Author: Emily Dickinson

12. "Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees [...] At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

13. "My fingers", said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault--because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe MY fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution."Darcy smiled and said, "You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers."
Author: Jane Austen

14. "When I was eight years old, I got a dummy for Christmas and started teaching myself. I got books and records and sat in front of the bathroom mirror, practising. I did my first show in the third grade and just kept going; there was no reason to quit."
Author: Jeff Dunham

15. "Jordana is in the umpire's highchair.I walk under the rugby posts and on to the tennis courts, stopping a few metres in front of her, in the service box.Her legs are crossed.I wait for her to speak.'I have two special skills,' she says.She pulls a sheaf of papers from under her bum. I recognize the font and the text boxes. It's my pamphlet.'Blackmail,' she says.She holds up her Zippo in the other hand. I can tell that she has been practising this.'And pyromania.'I am impressed that Jordana knows this word.'Right,' I say.'I'm going to blackmail you, Ol.'I feel powerless. She is in a throne.'Okay,' I say."
Author: Joe Dunthorne

16. "These days I must take the world in samll and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere."
Author: John Banville

17. "My dear doctor, I am surprised to hear you say that I am coughing very badly, as I have been practising all night."
Author: John Philpot Curran

18. "Besides, I always thought that one of the great attractions of practising law was what I like to call the collegiality of the profession and I think that duty of collegiality applies even when we are retired."
Author: Len G. Murray

19. "I think that practising the law, particularly litigation, and particularly in Glasgow, has always been difficult enough without adding to it by having problems with professional colleagues or former colleagues."
Author: Len G. Murray

20. "Corbulo: a name to conjure with, a name to follow into battle, wherever he led; a name to have a man marching to the gates of Rome, crying Imperator! until the crowds and the idiot senate and the corrupt wax-brains of the Praetorian Guard and every other man with voting powers in the city came to understand what we already knew: that this man should be our emperor, that Rome would thrive under his rule, in place of the fool who presently held the throne.Corbulo, who stood before us that bright, brisk spring afternoon and watched as our centurions bawled us through our paces, and then as Cadus took charge and marched us through the display that we had been practising, if we were honest, for the last four years, just for this moment."
Author: M.C. Scott

21. "DJing is an art that I have the utmost respect for, and I've been practising it since I was 17 years old. Doing Tom Cruise wedding-type things becomes the focal point of every interview, and you realize that you have to cut it out if you don't want to be answering questions about that."
Author: Mark Ronson

22. "I really didn't realise until I got back the work that goes into a performance. You're like an athlete - if you haven't been practising things tighten up. I had to do a lot of practice work, but I got through it. Even when I was 21 I would have a 40-minute nap on the day of a show, and I will still do that."
Author: Michael Crawford

23. "In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense."
Author: Michael Faraday

24. "Nothing consumes itself so much as generosity, because while you practise it you're losing the wherewithal to go on practising it."
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

25. "Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?"
Author: Norman Bethune

26. "As a practising lawyer, I was mediocre, but I worked hard as a law officer of the state government and on the private side. After becoming a judge, I maintained a low profile in other activities and concentrated only on judicial work."
Author: P. Sathasivam

27. "When we turn around & come face to face with our destiny, we discover that words (spoken) are not enough. I know so many people who are brilliant speakers but are quite incapable of practising what they preach. It's one thing to describe a situation & quite another to experience it. I realised a long time ago that a warrior in search of his dream must take his inspiration from what he actually does & not from what he imagines himself doing."
Author: Paulo Coelho

28. "I'm very spiritual and I'm Jewish by faith. I'm not a practising Jew, I'm more of a recreational Jew. I celebrate the holidays and I try to inform my kids about their heritage because I think we all at some point have to defend our heritage and if they get picked on I want them to know why."
Author: Peter Segal

29. "The hero of the following account, Homo immunologicus, who must give his life, with all its dangers and surfeits, a symbolic framework, is the human being that struggles with itself in concern for its form. We will characterize it more closely as the ethical human being, or rather Homo repetitious, Homo artista, the human in training. None of the circulating theories of behaviour or action is capable of grasping the practising human - on the contrary: we will understand why previous theories had to make it vanish systematically, regardless of whether they divided the field of observation into work and interaction, processes and communications, or active and contemplative life. With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity - that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

30. "In this book, we will naturally be dealing primarily with the manifestations of the third level of immunity. I gather material on the biography of Homo immunologicus, guided by the assumption that this is where to find the stuff from which the forms of anthropotechnics are made. By this I mean the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death. Only when these procedures have been grasped in a broad tableau of human 'work on oneself' can we evaluate the newest experiments in genetic engineering, to which, in the current debate, many have reduced the term 'anthropotechnics', reintroduced in 1997."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

31. "In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them.' Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

32. "In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the comprehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

33. "Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long."
Author: Philip Larkin

34. "If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary."
Author: Robert Schumann

35. "While still practising law, he'd run a hearse-rental agency. Then, later, he'd bought into a handkerchief factory in Baker Park. Their most famous innovation was the funeral hankerchief, a plain white cotton handkerchief with a black border. Not long afterwards he patented the first black-edged tissue. He'd made millions, apparently, though nobody knew what he'd done with the money. His only extravagance had been to install an elevator in the house, so he could move between floors without getting out of his wheelchair. 'So what did he mean about hearing money?' Jed asked. 'It's his factory across the river. He claims he can hear the money being made."
Author: Rupert Thomson

36. "Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start--poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye."
Author: Seamus Heaney

37. "He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing."
Author: Simon Callow

38. "If I stop practising, I will be an average singer. There are a lot of singers I know who hardly practise, yet sing well."
Author: Sonu Nigam

39. "From childhood, I have been more of a musician than a singer. People close to me know how much effort I put into practising. Even when I am travelling, I have my tanpura on my iPhone."
Author: Sonu Nigam

40. "I am a vicar's daughter and still a practising member of the Church of England."
Author: Theresa May

41. "I think there is value in having practising scientists as leaders of research institutions."
Author: Thomas R. Cech

42. "Me?" said Bragg. "I'm not alive. Revived, from time to time - maybe. but not alive."Liar."Try me."You forget, Mister Bragg - Stu honey - Stuart darling - Bragg baby. I already have."They had almost reached their destination.Col said: "I don't have burn marks for nothing, my dear. I don't have these scars by chance. I'm covered with your fingerprints. Covered from head to toe and back again on the other side."You sound just like Minna," said Bragg.I know," Col said. "I know I do. I've been practising."
Author: Timothy Findley

43. "Even Mahatma Gandhi - hardly a comfortable character - always wore a bowler hat with his loin cloth when practising as a barrister in London."
Author: William Donaldson

Practising Quotes Pictures