Practice quotes
4.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside practice — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I daily examine myself on three points: In planning for others, have I failed in conscientiousness? In intercourse with friends, have I been insincere? And have I failed to practice what I have been taught?"
"I went through the same process when I sort of addressed in my practice cancer next, when I began all the veganism and the fasting and the purifications. Part of that was just gratitude, expressing gratitude, thank you, thank you."
"Growth and fulfillment come from abandoning old practices and embracing new ones."
"Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to "feel it in your bones."
"It is easy to talk on religion, but difficult to practice it."
"I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred."
"We must patiently practice every day."
"You know, if ever there was a people who should know how to practice brotherhood, it is the American Negro and it is the people of Egypt."
"To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river."
"Our joy, peace and happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, and negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness."
"Simple practices like conscious breathing and smiling are very important. They can change our civilization."
"The whole of virtue consists in its practice."
"There is no justice in bureaucracy for the individual, for bureaucracy caters only to itself. One cannot practice the same bureaucracy as one is fighting against."
"I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle."
"Children, like dogs, have so sharp and fine a scent that they detect and hunt out everything--the bad before all the rest. They also know well enough how this or that friend stands with their parents; and as they practice no dissimulation whatever, they serve as excellent barometers by which to observe the degree of favor or disfavor at which we stand with their parents."
"Let every thought come and hug you, but you don't hug anything. Then, gradually, the noise will start to back off."
"Everything is happening spontaneously, and the witnessing of it is also happening spontaneously. Everything is already happening in natural balance."
"I don’t bring yesterday’s poses to today’s practice. I know yesterday’s poses, but when I practice today I become a beginner. I don’t want yesterday’s experience. I want to see what new understanding may come in addition to what I felt up to now."
"I finally understood that by being on a perpetual diet, I had practiced a "disordered" form of eating my whole life. I restricted when I was hungry and in need of nutrition and binged when I was so grotesquely full I couldn't be comfortable in any position by lying down. Diets that tell people what to eat or when to eat are the practices inbetween. And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating."
"Living a good life leads to enduring happiness. Goodness in and of itself is the practice AND the reward."
