Top 100 But Useful Quotes
#1. Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless - or even actually harmful.
Isaac Asimov
#2. All work undertaken should be useful - not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#3. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.
Mary Oliver
#4. Do something. Do something small. Do something small but useful. Do something small but useful now.
Bob Bemer
#5. Do Something Small But Useful Now.
Bob Bemer
#6. If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in U.S. industry, even more than elsewhere, there's layer after layer of management - a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities.
Noam Chomsky
#7. He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#8. Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.
Anne Enright
#9. I think the time in between albums, as much as it was not anticipated, it was much-needed, and very helpful, very useful. I've done nothing but hone my craft, and get better, and learn, and gather information in the process. So I'm grateful for it in retrospect.
Joe Budden
#10. I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.
Neale Donald Walsch
#11. As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.
Noam Chomsky
#12. To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.
Henry Adams
#13. Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.
Joshua Foer
#14. It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#15. I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while.
Yann Martel
#16. We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.
Oswald Chambers
#17. Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us.
Samuel Johnson
#18. But I value their hatred. I find it very useful. You see, people are always at their weakest when they're angry.
Lionel Luthor From Smallville
#19. You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
George Mikes
#20. The problem in the modern spiritual landscape is not only a plethora of genuine, useful material but also a marketplace teeming with questionable ideas, practices, and leaders.
Thomas Moore
#21. It is great to be introspective, self analysis can be useful, but only if it results in action.
Joe Sacco
#22. The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#23. I'm sure computers are useful, but next to all these warm, beautiful books they seem so cold and clinical.
J.R. Johansson
#24. William McKinley has left us a priceless gift in the example of a useful and pure life, in his fidelity to public trusts and in his demonstration of the value of kindly virtues that not only ennoble but lead to success.
Grover Cleveland
#25. Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.
Gregory Maguire
#26. I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn't be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#27. Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#28. That useful alterations will be suggested by experience, could not but be foreseen ... It moreover equally enables the general and state governments to originate the amendment of errors as they may be pointed out by the experience on one side or on the other.
James Madison
#29. Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.
Robert Bringhurst
#30. But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?
Alain De Botton
#31. Information can perhaps be useful as a support-stick and help you cross the way ... but if you want to find your way in the darkness, only knowledge can forge that path for you ... only knowledge.
Narendra Modi
#32. Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn't make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.
Amy Bloom
#33. From time to time it may find it useful to send out missionaries, but its first missionary task is to be a witness in and to the worlds in which it finds itself. All missionary tasks are in that sense local.
Stanley Hauerwas
#34. If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.
Michael Pollan
#35. If there was a time when 'The Ecologist' appeared not to be making a difference at all, not doing something useful, I wouldn't do 'The Ecologist,' but I think it is useful.
Zac Goldsmith
#36. I would like to employ more people but I don't want to empower my charities at the cost of exploiting people or doing things that are not useful, so I'm working on that.
Russell Simmons
#37. Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.
Pascal Bruckner
#38. To his family, Pasteur remarks in frustration, "How difficult it is to obtain the triumph of truth! Opposition is a useful stimulant, but bad faith is such a pitiable thing. How is it that they are not struck with the results shown by statistics?
Bill Wasik
#39. Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us.
Marissa Mayer
#41. I was actually accepted into medical school in Italy. But then I wanted to come back and learn medicine in Germany. And while waiting, I decided to join a business school. I figured it would be useful for doctors to know some business as well!
Jochen Zeitz
#42. I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'
Feist
#43. I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used.
Alastair Reynolds
#44. Ah, Hah! But you see, Baron, I know as a Mentat when you will send the executioner. You will hold back just so long as I am useful. To move sooner would be wasteful and I'm yet of much use. I know what it is you learned from that lovely Dune planet - waste not? True, Baron?
-Piter De Vries
Frank Herbert
#45. I'm a classic Church of England member, but part of its strength is the fact that it doesn't ask us to sign up to too much of a canon ... but I've always found the teachings of Jesus and the Bible quite useful as a sort of handy guide.
David Cameron
#46. Detective stories are mostly bunkum ... But they amuse people ... And they're useful sometimes.
Agatha Christie
#47. I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.
Humphry Davy
#48. But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
Paul Gauguin
#49. Having fins in the water was useful to travel quickly, but the bulky appendage left much to be desired for exerting dominance. Something about being unable to sit, legs open, left me feeling feminine."
~Fin
Brenda Pandos
#50. I used to be a businessman and I enjoyed what I did and I thought that it was socially useful. I don't have anything against business or private enterprise or capitalism per se, but I think that it is time to rethink the regulation of capitalism.
Charles Ferguson
#51. We meet With few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth.
Jean De La Bruyere
#52. Business is a useful tool in politics, but it's not enough. You need much more than to be a good businessman, to be a good politician.
Sebastian Pinera
#53. It is for this reason that Aristotle recommends that the writer begin "in the middle of things" and fill in the exposition as he can. But for purposes of discussion it will be useful to treat the three components separately.
John Gardner
#54. Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#55. The inspired and expired air may be sometimes very useful, by condensing and cooling the blood that passeth through the lungs; I hold that the depuration of the blood in that passage, is not only one of the ordinary, but one of the principal uses of respiration.
Robert Boyle
#56. Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.
Mark Haddon
#57. For behaviorist films, that's been much more useful - the change of technology - but for my kind of films, doing them on film is much better, because it's more beautiful.
Michael Apted
#58. The minions are stupid and savage, but they have one thing that makes them semi-useful: there's a whole fucking lot of them.
Julie Kagawa
#59. The first question here, then, is not "What is best for my soul?" nor is it even "What is most useful to humanity?" But-transcending both these limited aims-what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?
Evelyn Underhill
#60. I was quite convinced that I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I felt that law school would be a useful way to understand public policy and to understand business in this environment.
Kevin Warsh
#61. I'd like to be invisible. To be anonymous and see things for what they really are. The truth may be painful but it's probably useful!
Marc Jacobs
#62. I'm very lucky in the sense that I've got a voice that's distinctive. Not good, but distinctive. That's a very useful thing to have in this business. I'm glad on the one hand that I've got it, but I wish it was more powerful. I wish I had a greater range. I wish it was more accurate at times.
Gary Numan
#63. Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.
Alfred Adler
#64. Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose
Eckhart Tolle
#65. It's so easy to misuse social media as a dating tool. I think it can be useful but it's scary when you think about who can access this information and what they're doing with it.
Justin Long
#66. Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love.
Robert Gottlieb
#67. So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
June Jordan
#68. My thoughts don't really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it's more honest
more pedagogically useful, more truthful
to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions.
Sara Levine
#69. I've never been interested in philosophy, but some of Jung's ideas seem useful in helping people understand pictures and so forth.
Sigmar Polke
#70. The reader will pardon us another little digression; foreign to the object of this book but characteristic and useful ...
Victor Hugo
#71. Beauty is highly desirable but simplicity and usefulness are the overwhelming fashion of our age. Just because it's beautiful does not mean it's useful.
Gerry McGovern
#72. The captain, thinking over this event afterward, realized that by his own lifelong standards he had a crew composed entirely of lunatics, with himself well to the front in degree of aberration; but he was fairly sure that this particular form of insanity was going to be useful.
Hal Clement
#73. When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
Tom Stoppard
#74. If you want to be useful, you can always start now. It will be a humble prototype of your grand vision, but you'll be in the game. Start by teaching someone this week. Starting small puts 100% of your energy into solving real problems for real people.
Derek Sivers
#75. The Queen touched her lips thoughtfully with a single long white finger. 'The Fair Folk, unlike humans, do not concern themselves overmuch with liking. Love, perhaps, and hate. Both are useful emotions. But liking ... She shrugged elegantly.
Cassandra Clare
#76. Best practices are useful reference points, but they must come with a warning label : The more you rely on external intelligence, the less you will value an internal idea.
And this is the age of the idea
Gyan Nagpal
#77. What were you going to do with it?" McCain asked.
"I just thought it might come in useful."
"Were you planning to attack me?"
"No. But that's a good idea.
Anthony Horowitz
#78. Not only does the summer bring warm weather and tons of summer activities, but it also yields a fresh crop of increasingly useful avocados!
Marcus Samuelsson
#79. Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer's day, a long-running sitcom, one's life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?
Jasper Fforde
#80. You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.
Caitlin Moran
#82. Style is a capitalist invention. It's a trademark. It's very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn't my first concern. I got restless
Art Spiegelman
#83. I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.
John Darnielle
#84. Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#85. It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#86. People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?
Tad Williams
#87. I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.
Antony Gormley
#88. All the games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot to be happy, how to take pleasure in little things and last, but not least, how to dream
Michael Ende
#89. The President regards the Japanese as a brave people; but courage, though useful in time of war, is subordinate to knowledge of arts; hence, courage without such knowledge is not to be highly esteemed.
Townsend Harris
#90. Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#91. There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#93. It may be possible through detachment, to gain knowledge that is 'useful;' but only through participation is it possible to gain the knowledge that is helpful.
Harry Stack Sullivan
#94. But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. Basic research is very useful, but it should be more geared toward application than it was before.
Luc Montagnier
#96. I wouldn't go so far as to say I've got a plan. But I've got an idea. It's a very useful thing sometimes, an idea. - Superintendent Battle
Agatha Christie
#97. Whenever a man can get hold of numbers, they are invaluable: if correct, they assist in informing his own mind, but they are still more useful in deluding the minds of others. Numbers are the masters of the weak, but the slaves of the strong.
Charles Babbage
#98. Debating clubs among boys are very useful, not only as affording pleasant meetings and interesting discussions, but also as serving for training grounds for developing the knowledge and the qualities that are needed in public life.
Annie Besant
#99. Psychology must not only strive to become a useful basis for the other mental sciences, but it must also turn again and again to the historical sciences, in order to obtain an understanding for the more highly developed metal processes.
Wilhelm Wundt
#100. The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".
Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
