Practicing Quotes
Practice perfects.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Dailiness overrides perfectionism.
It’s practice, right?
Laura Groff
Practice makes better.
Practice makes easier.
Practice makes permanent.
Practice makes progress.
Practice creates the master.
Don Miguel Ruiz
Practice makes for improvement.
Quantity leads to quality.
Something small, every day.
Practice teaches you to practice.
Edward Johnston
Tomorrow’s victory is today’s practice.
Chris Bradford
Do just a little each day.
Talent is only a starting point.
Irving Berlin
You are what you practice most.
Richard Carlson
Experts were once amateurs who kept practicing.
Amit Kalantri
Just a stint every day does it.
Steinbeck
Not all or nothing, but always something.
Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable.
Steph Smith
Practice every time you get a chance.
Bill Monroe
You are who you practice to be.
A little each day can accomplish a lot.
Champions keep playing until they get it right.
Billie Jean King
Determination, effort, and practice are rewarded with success.
Mary Lydon Simonsen
It never gets easier. You just get better.
It takes persistent practice to master any act.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Practice doesn’t just make permanent, practice makes progress
Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice reduces the imperfection.
Toba Beta
The practice not the product is the goal.
Cleaning and organizing is a practice, not a project.
Meagan Francis
Dailiness is a commitment, but the rewards are guaranteed.
Practice doesn’t make perfect if you’re doing it wrong.
Frank Sonnenberg
Practice doesn't make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
Vince Lombardi
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
James Clear
You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.
Amit Kalantri
You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.
Phillip Glass
Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
John Lubbock
One thing a day adds up. Each day adds up.
Every day I write a little, without hope and without despair.
Isak Dinesen
If you show up every day, the days turn into something.
Practice is the price you pay today to be better tomorrow.
James Clear
The only practice that matters is the one you consistently do.
What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
Aristotle
If everyday you keep getting better, you end up being the best.
Amit Kalantri
If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.
Lindsay Buckingham
Keep your daily action small. Strive to get 1% better every day.
James Clear
Nothing is so often irrevocably neglected as an opportunity of daily occurrence.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Practice makes process, process makes progress, progress makes projects come to life.
Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.
Jim Rohn
The essential substance of genius is the daily act of showing up.
An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.
E F Schumacher
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
Robert Collier
The more ladies practice walking, the more graceful they become in their movements.
J W Howe
A thousand days of training to develop, ten thousand days of traininng to polish.
Miyamoto Musashi
Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer and practice it.
Richard Bach
If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.
Gail Sher
If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times.
Steph Smith
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Yogi Berra
It doesn’t matter how you practice your craft, what matters is actually doing it.
Just a few acts of self-discipline, practiced daily, over a reasonable period of time.
Jim Rohn
One daily practice I can’t do without? Turning my time into joy and meaning.
Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.
Ann Voskamp
All the good maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice.
Blaise Pascal
What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.
Gretchen Rubin
You are rewarded in public for what you have intensely practiced and refined in private.
Tony Robbins
What you do on your ordinary days determines what you can achieve on your extraordinary days.
James Clear
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Richard Branson
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
Anthony Trollope
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
Gertrude Stein
Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.
Rembrandt
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
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
Malcolm Gladwell
The things that you teach cannot have any weight unless you shall be the first to practice them.
Lactantius
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln
If you add only a little to a little, and do this often, soon that little will become great.
Hesiod
The way anything is developed is through practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice and more practice.
Joyce Meyer
What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.
Bach
The challenge of every day is to establish some relationship between what you want from life and your Daily Planner.
Robert Brault
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.
Van Gogh
Even the masterpieces that have been produced on tight timelines are the sum of decades, spent patiently labouring on other works.
Rick Rubin
If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.
Jascha Heifetz
Little atoms make the wondrous whole.There must be little ere there can be more.The lightest things are those that highest rise.
Carpenter
The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.
Thomas More
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
Kurt Vonnegut
A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.
My research and practice has a documentary motivation honouring the slow time taken to observe and contemplate the small wonders of the everyday.
Amy Shelton
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
It’s not about perfect, it’s about effort, and when you bring that effort every single day, that’s where transformation happens, that’s how change occurs.
Julián Michaels
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
The more we see health as a practice rather than as a problem to fix, the more we encourage the body’s natural potential to be healthy.
Aarti Patel
The practice had less to do with the output and more with getting myself in a proper frame of mind for the rest of my day.
Michael Bierut
An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.
Henri Matisse
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
I think with practice, you can become whatever you want to be, and with a goal you can go in any direction that you want to go in.
Michael Phelps
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
I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and all the time. You can say I practiced in public.
Bob Dylan
If you want to gain momentum and improve your motivation, begin by setting goals that are worthwhile but highly achievable. Master the basics. Then practice them every day without fail.
John C Maxwell
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
There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else - but persistent.
Raoul Bott
You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren’t good, the parts that aren't yours.
David Bayles and Ted Orland
If I had to say in a few sentences what my process is… I play with random shapes, I wait for the spark, and then I try to reproduce that spark.
Zak Foster
Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
Martha Graham
A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.
Mozart
Forget perfect on the first try. In the face of frustration, your best tool is a few deep breaths, and remembering that you can do anything once you've practed two hundred times.
Miriam Peskowitz
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
My materials were simple and wherever there was a free moment, I would sit down and do some work. Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.
Ruth Asawa
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
What makes you wise is not what you learn, but what you practice. What makes you wealthy is not what you earn, but what you invest. So, invest in what to practice, and practice what to invest.
Michael Peshkam
That’s my basic creative practice: walking around outdoors, pen and notebook in hand, hoping to stumble on a moment of insight. Luckily, autumn is full of inspiration: colourful leaves, assorted birds, days of blue skies and golden light.
Grant Snider
We become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly it is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts that we become courageous.
Aristotle
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
Build small habits. Make big plans. Keep your daily action small. Strive to get 1% better every day. Keep your daily mindset big. Think about how you can play a bigger game. Start small, but never dream small.
James Clear
Do it again. Play it again. Sing it again. Read it again. Write it again. Sketch it again. Rehearse it again. Run it again. Try it again. Because again is practice, and practice is improvement, and improvement only leads to perfection.
Richelle E Goodrich
Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.
Jim Rohn
Happiness requires nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while misery is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.
Walking is central to my practice, It is how I gather sensory impressions and bear witness to the ephemeral: the shifting path of a flock of birds, the imprint of a well-travelled footpath, or the brief impression of waves on sand.
Vicki Potter
An artist needs enough time to reflect, to revise, to explore various directions, to make changes, to lay foundaitons. You have to build up a working routine – you have to be able to surprise yourself and above all, to make mistalkes.
Bridget Riley
I work like a gardener… Things come slowly… Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. I must graft. I must water… Ripening goes on in my mind. So I’m always working at a great many things at the same time.
Joan Miró
Mastery doesn’t come from repetition; it comes from targeted, corrective repetition. If you want to get really good at something, you don’t just show up for a scrimmage every week, you find a coach to show you what and how to practice.
The person who would do great things well must practice daily on little ones, and she who would have the assistance of the Almighty in important acts, must be daily and hourly accustomed to consult His will in the minor affairs of life.
Fanny Forester
The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.
Henry Hazlitt
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
The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him—and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.
J Paul Getty
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
Dailiness, I've come to believe, is more important than training or education or workshops or mentorship or MFAs. You don't get better at what you are told to do, or shown how to do, or educated to do. You get better at what you actually do, over and over.
Mary Jo Hoffman
We are creatires of habit, that God knows this (since He created us), and thus our gracious, redeeming God meets us where we are by giving us Spirit-empowered, heart-calibrating, habit-forming practices to retrain our loves. This is the means of the Spirit’s transformation, not an alternative to Spirit-shaped sanctification.
James K A Smith
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
Mozart
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
To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.
Angela Duckworth
Keeping the habit alive is a powerful act. It’s easier to stay in shape than to get in shape. It’s easier to keep a house clean than to get it clean. Many days it may feel like you are treading water, but maintaining your progress saves your future self a great deal of work.
James Clear
Many of the best things in life are endless. Being in a great relationship. Staying fit and healthy. Doing work that fulfills you. Being a good parent, coach, or teacher. Stop worrying about accomplishing these things and instead focus on building a life where you continually practice them. The important stuff has no finish line.
James Clear
Whether your purpose for writing is artistic expression, communication with friends and family, the healing of the inner life, or achieving public recognition for your art - the foundation is the same: the claiming of yourself as an artist/writer and the strengthening of your writing voice through practice, study, and helpful response from other writers.
Pat Schneider
Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice - perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again - and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court…spontaneity isn't random.
Malcolm Gladwell
It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it.
Natalie Goldberg
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
There is no occupation in the world so absorbing as trying to paint. Everything, every worry, is for the moment forgotten in the effort, however unsuccessful, of creating a masterpiece. To the surprise of many and the horror of some, I have also found great pleasure in needlework, which, after all, is only another way of making pictures.
Ernest Thesiger
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.
Paul Gauguin
I’m a realist, not a perfectionist. I’ve learned to fit my small pockets of time into a project rather than trying to fit projects into my very little time. Because when you look at it this way, you allow yourself to release the need of creating a masterpiece, and in turn, you give yourself more permission to play and be.
Lorna Crane
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
Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.
Jamie Wyeth
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
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, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
Ray Bradbury
What is a system? It’s a process for predictably achieving a goal based on specific, Orderly, repeatable principles and practices. Systems leverage your time, money, and abilities. They are great tools for personal growth. Systems are deliberate, intentional, and practical. They really work — regardless of your profession, talent level, or experience. They improve your performance. A life without any systems is a life where the person must face every task and challenge from scratch.
John C Maxwell
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
The most expensive part of a bad habit is rarely the action itself, but rather the identity it quietly reinforces underneath. The issue isn't skipping once. It's that you practiced being someone who skips. Now, that doesn't mean you need to be perfect. Everyone falls off from time to time. But it is good to have a plan for getting back on track quickly. And try to find a small way to practice being the type of person you want to be today.
James Clear
He that seeketh victory over his nature, let him not set himself too great, nor too small tasks, for the first will make him dejected by often failings and the second will make him a small proceeder though by often prevailings. And at the fist, let him practice with helps, as the swimmers do with bladders or rushes, but after a time let him practice with disadvantages, as dancers do with thick shoes for it breeds great perfection, if the practise be harder than the use.
Bacon
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
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
Martha Graham
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
Anytime in my life when I have managed to go from a vision to a reality, the vision has not been a plan but a practice. In other words, what matters is not having a vision, but rather making a habit of returning to and revising the vision. For the big things in my life, I'm always coming back to them week after week—sometimes day after day. As new information arrives, the vision gets updated. The dream becomes more crystallized over time. It's a habit of thinking about where you want to go with an ever-increasing degree of clarity. You do not need a vision, you need the practice of envisioning.
James Clear
Success is often found by practicing the fundamentals everyone knows they should be doing, but find too boring or basic to practice routinely. Work is endless. Exercise is endless. Parenting is endless. Same with marriage, writing, investing, creating, and more. You get to choose the parts of your life, but many of the important things in life cannot be "finished." Do not approach an endless game with a finite mindset. The objective is not to be done, but to settle into a daily lifestyle you can sustain and that allows you to make daily progress on the areas that matter. Embrace the fact that life is continual and look for ways to enjoy the daily practice.
James Clear
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
Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on. Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games... the little things really do count.
Daniel Chambliss