Quotes about Practice

There are a great many "wetless" bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them. To plunge is the only way.

We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too.

In relation to spiritual disciplines, the most helpful distinction is the difference between trying to do something and training to do something.

Every single thing that Jesus taught us to do was something he had put into daily practice in circumstances just like ours.

Put his words into practice and find them to be true.

We should not try to love that person; we should train to become the kind of person who would love them. Only then can the ideal of love pass into a real possibility and practice. Our aim under love is not to be loving to this or that person, or in this or that kind of situation, but to be a person possessed by love as an overall character of life.

Disciplines are activities that are in our power and that enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort.

Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.

Religion as a historical human practice was therefore not of divine origin, and its developments and activities had to be of an entirely human origin.

The lessons I taught you, the tradition I have passed on, all that you heard me say or saw me do, put into practice; and the God of peace will be with you (Phil. 4:9, NEB).

Professing to believe has, sadly, played a large role in the practice of religion. It has profoundly stained our understanding of what religion is. Some people seem to profess belief in God "just in case" there is a God. But they neither are committed to nor believe in the idea that God exists.

We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.