Practical Understanding Quotes

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.

When I pick my subcommittee chairmen, I look for people that understand what it's like to run successful businesses, who know what it's like to sign the front of the check instead of the back of the check: somebody that gets it.

It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.

My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.

He who best knows the world will love it least.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it.

The only way to know something absolutely is to experience it for yourself; anything less is theory, speculation, and belief. .

Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience

Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

Experience is the universal mother of sciences.

Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?

My approach has never been to start from theories to arrive at facts, but on the contrary, to try to bring out from the facts the explanatory thread without which they appear incomprehensible and elude effective action.

Come down here once, and use your eyes, and you will know more than we can teach you.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.

To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.

Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands

It turns out the businessman knows more about how the economy really works than the chattering class. What a shock.

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.