Daily Practice Quotes

Dailiness overrides perfectionism.

Something small, every day.

Just a stint every day does it.

Steinbeck

Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable.

Steph Smith

A little each day can accomplish a lot.

Dailiness is a commitment, but the rewards are guaranteed.

Success is the product of daily habits - not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

James Clear

One thing a day adds up. Each day adds up.

If you show up every day, the days turn into something.

Every day I write a little, without hope and without despair.

Isak Dinesen

Nothing is so often irrevocably neglected as an opportunity of daily occurrence.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

The essential substance of genius is the daily act of showing up.

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

Robert Collier

If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times.

Steph Smith

Do just a little each day.

Not all or nothing, but always something.

What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.

Gretchen Rubin

What you do on your ordinary days determines what you can achieve on your extraordinary days.

James Clear

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.

Jim Rohn

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Anthony Trollope

If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.

Gertrude Stein

Write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.

Brian Tracy

A daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time.

Maria Popova

It’s the quiet progress made each day and the incremental changes that truly make an impact over time.

One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday.

Angela Duckworth

If you add only a little to a little, and do this often, soon that little will become great.

Hesiod

The challenge of every day is to establish some relationship between what you want from life and your Daily Planner.

Robert Brault

Even the masterpieces that have been produced on tight timelines are the sum of decades, spent patiently labouring on other works.

Rick Rubin

Little atoms make the wondrous whole. There must be little ere there can be more. The lightest things are those that highest rise.

Carpenter

A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.

What is the bare minimum amount of creative work you can do in any one day and still feel like a whole person?

Austin Kleon

Each morning, identify one thing that would make today "time well spent." Even on busy days, completing this single meaningful activity creates a sense of purpose.

Slow and sure is better than fast and flimsy. Perseverance, by its daily gains, enriches a man far more than fits and starts of fortunate speculation.

Charles Spurgeon

To understand success, pay less attention to the final product and more to the mundane process. The seeds of greatness are planted in the daily grind.

Adam Grant

I like to think about practice in terms of time, space, and materials. If you make time, clear space, and bring materials, you can practice wherever you are.

Austin Kleon

The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.

Margrethe II of Denmark

My daily sojourn in the library is the best part of my day and I have to be careful it does not so preoccupy my mind and heart that I miss my meals.

Marie Pellechet

I think to make one be still for a moment and pay attention, to anything, is a good thing. A moment of attention, in a day which otherwise might be lost to ceaseless activity.

Mary Ruefle

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Marian Wright Edelman

It is beyond a doubt that everyone should have time for some special delight, if only five minutes each day to seek out a lovely flower or cloud or a star or learn a verse or brighten another’s dull task.

Helen Keller

Keep your daily action small. Strive to get 1% better every day.

James Clear

Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day’s worth of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.

Austin Kleon

I wrote a song every day. Each song had to be less than 1 minute long and take no longer than an hour to make, first takes preferred.

Olivia Rafferty

A paradox of life is that the greatest returns come in the long-term, but the opportunity cost of moving slowly is huge. Long-term thinking is not slow acting. Act fast on things that compound. Never let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade.

James Clear

It’s not that hard on any given day, but the trick is you can’t skip days. Your workouts can be reasonable and still deliver results—if you don’t skip days. Your writing sessions can be short and the work will still accumulate—if you don’t skip days. As long as you’re working, you’ll get there.

James Clear

Dailiness shuts down the inner critic. Snaps you out of autopilot. Lowers the stakes. Is the easiest and hardest thing. Everyone can do it but almost no one does. Dailiness makes the process more important than the results. It’s not committing to make art every day (too hard), it’s committed to not breaking the chain. Commit to the process and the process makes the art.

~Mary-Jo Hoffman

Lay down a method also for your reading, for which you allot a certain share of your mornings; let it be in a consistent and consecutive course, and not in that desultory and immethodical manner, in which many people read scraps of different authors, upon different subjects. Keep a useful and short commonplace book of what you read, to help your memory only, and not for pedantic quotations.

Philip Stanhope

I set out to complete a challenge I made for myself called Project 1,825 Things. The idea was to write what I call a “five things draft” … every day for one year. At the end of those 365 days I would have accrued 1,825 “things” - ideas, observations, images, anecdotes, memories, false starts, trains of thought, whatever the case may be.

Summer Brennan

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, well, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad - you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, it’s been a good year.

Ray Bradbury

Write down one idea each day. Most ideas will be simple and uninteresting, but within a year you’ll have a handful that are compelling and useful. Little bits of genius are bubbling up all the time, but you need a habit of recording your ideas in order to capture the good ones. It’s a myth that great storytellers only think of great stories or that insightful people only have brilliant ideas. But they do have a habit of capturing their experiences and insights, and the patience to filter the majority until the best remain.

James Clear

If somebody says to me, you’re a prolific writer - it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

John McPhee

I’ll get the book done if I just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does. I only hope it is some good. I have very grave doubts sometimes. I don’t want this to seem hurried. It must be just as slow and measured as the rest but I am sure of one thing — it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do. Now to work on it.

Steinbeck

I sit down. I write five things. I don’t overthink it. I suppose it is a diary project, but there’s something about the five things format in particular which I find freeing. Making myself push through to write five things, rather than stopping at two, or four, is important as well. I almost always discover something unexpected. Five things is just enough to push yourself, to go deeper, to give a little shape to your thoughts.

Summer Brennan

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

David Bayles and Ted Orland