Pragmatic Quotes

Patrick sort of had a very pragmatic, practical, Ed-like approach and went down to see.

My mother was pragmatic, focused and extremely, exceedingly practical, and she was the ultimate self-determining person.

There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.

Unfortunately, today's colleges and universities, and especially our business schools, do not offer pragmatic crisis management teachings.

An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive on the long run.

For strictly scientific or technological purposes all this is irrelevant. On a pragmatic view, as on a religious view, theory and concepts are held in faith. On the pragmatic view the only thing that matters is that the theory is efficacious, that it 'works' and that the necessary preliminaries and side issues do not cost too much in time and effort. Beyond that, theory and concepts go to constitute a language in which the scientistic matters at issue can be formulated and discussed.

An idealistic lover is a blind lover, and therefore a true lover; a pragmatic lover is a sighted lover, and therefore a false lover.

This is a nice metaphor, too, about mothers and daughters - that when it came time for me to make my own, I was making a completely different garden than the one that my mom has. They don't look like they came from relatives. Hers is a very productive and pragmatic vegetable garden, and mine is a ridiculous overabundance of useless plants. It doesn't feed anybody, it doesn't serve any purpose.

There are certain conceptual powers in this project, like the relationship of glass to sand, and the idea of putting glass back into the earth, which is where it comes from, which are related to the whole concept of I Am. So there's that one below-surface idea, and then there's these other practical and more pragmatic ideas about how the light functions and the geometry and mathematics behind the reverberation of light from the surface outward.

I don't have this fantasy about marriage anymore. Everyone says it takes hard work. Well, it kind of does - and I'm much more pragmatic about romance than I used to be.

Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.

If you give up on your principles I don’t think that’s being pragmatic... Doing the wrong thing, even partially, isn’t being practical...if you have the right ideas and are forceful enough...I think you can get the support you need.

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism.

I'm not asking any of you to make drastic changes to every single one of your recipes or to totally change the way you do business. But what I am asking is that you consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods that we all love.

Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.

Many in Taiwan believe that Hu Jintao is much more sophisticated than his predecessors in understanding Taiwan. He represents a different generation of leaders, more pragmatic, less ideological.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn't like to have enemies around him.

Knowing yourself, knowing where you want to get, combining those things gives you the pragmatic steps.

I like the dream, like fantasy dresses. Women can dream at 9 in the morning and at 10 o’clock at night, it doesn’t matter. I think it is also important for me to make it pragmatic and practical and wearable. I always say, 'If you can’t eat it, it’s not food, and if you can’t wear it, it’s not fashion, it is something else.'

The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.

We have put the Cold War behind us. We no longer count our divisions and our warheads. And I am Russia's first civilian defense minister in many centuries. We have become more pragmatic.

There's a lot of food restriction in the Bible, but it does say you're allowed to eat crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts. I decided to take advantage of that and eat a cricket. It was chocolate-covered, and I'm not sure that's the way they were served in Moses' time. But this was a rule that seemed crazy on the outside, then actually turned out to be pragmatic and compassionate.

China is ruthlessly pragmatic. It supports North Korea for its own selfish interests. And I believe that China no longer considers us an ally. The current president, Xi Jinping, cultivates close relations with South Korea. He has never met with me, the leader of North Korea, something that the leader of China has always done. At the grand celebrations in Beijing two years ago commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, he placed the president of Russia and the president of South Korea at his side. In North Korea, we pay a lot of attention to ceremonies and what they signal.

In my experience of women, women have a greater capacity. Maybe women, even very pragmatic ones, are less guarded about showing emotions.

My mum is a bit unconventional; she's outdoorsy and has more of an emotional intelligence, whereas my dad is pragmatic; he's a businessman.

It is a fact that the US defence budget is larger than the defence budgets of all other countries taken together. This is why I understand the US President when he says that his NATO allies should take over part of this burden. It is a pragmatic and understandable approach.

There is a lot of flesh to be put on the bones - but there is at least an opening for a more pragmatic, less ideological debate about how to build economies that work for people, within the limits of our planet.

The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154)

I grew up with Scientology - my parents at one point were clerical. It's a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it's had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It's not a threat or some cult.

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.That would do it every time.

You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic.

The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist. ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

So as a founder, you have an authenticity and a human factor that is really special and that gives an enormous amount of energy and fuel. But as a founder, you’re also not as cold, maybe, or as pragmatic.

Contrary to what most people believe, trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don't; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create.

As the field of coaching finds its way to becoming a mature discipline, James Flaherty's dedicated field research, study, and sound articulation offers a definitive ground and a sensibility of genuine care. At the core this book offers a way of thinking about human beings that makes action and practice central to learning. This is a no-nonsense, generous, pragmatic book that belongs on the shelf every coach, novice or veteran.

I just hope the film [Aquarius] doesn't feel overly nostalgic because too much nostalgia for me leads to depression. I think Clara is very pragmatic.

If the United Kingdom considers it necessary to start a dialogue on certain issues, we are ready for that, we are not going to pout or sulk. We take quite a pragmatic approach towards cooperation with our partners and we believe that it would be beneficial for both our countries.

We see that leaders in Western Europe [there are some debates of course, we also see that and analyse it all] stick to, I cannot say right or wrong ones, it always depends on someone's view, but I think, very pragmatic approaches in addressing economic issues.

Germany will continue to play a central - perhaps even a more important - role in the European Union. I think that we will all miss the pragmatic approach of the British, however, particularly in those long nights of negotiation.

The aims of pure basic science, unlike those of applied science, are neither fast-flowing nor pragmatic. The quick harvest of applied science is the useable process, the medicine, the machine. The shy fruit of pure science is understanding.

The three branches of somaesthetics: the analytic study of the body's role in perception, experience, and action and thus in our mental, moral, and social life; the pragmatic study of methodologies to improve our body-mind functioning and thus expand our capacities of self-fashioning; and the practical branch that investigates such pragmatic methods by testing them on our own flesh in concrete experience and practice.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

Strengthening the role the United Nations can play...will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives.

I think in Singapore, we stand a chance of making the one-man-one-vote system work. With amendments as we have done, you know, like GRCs.. We need to make it work. And I believe with pragmatic adjustments, given these favourable conditions, we can have more open debate.

Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.

What are we seeking to achieve? We are seeking to optimize budget spending. I believe that even in such uneasy times we employ a very pragmatic approach towards economic and social issues. We do address major social problems and deliver on our promises to our people.

I am not against being pragmatic, because it is pragmatic to make a good pass, not a bad one. If I have the ball, what do I do with it? Could anybody argue that a bad solution like just kicking it away is pragmatic just because, sometimes, it works by accident?

Fox News has effectively become the establishment. Fox has - you know, during non-election years, really tended to out flank the Republican Party in many ways in its conservatism and yet sort of lists back a little towards the, let`s say right-center establishment type figures in part because Rupert Murdock, whose Ailes`s ultimate boss over at 21st Century Fox, is a bit more pragmatic and centrist than Ailes himself.