Quotes About Useless Knowledge

#1. I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand

Oscar Wilde

#2. Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you're in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship's gone, you're stuck knowing all this garbage.

Rob Sheffield

#3. It was funny how all the useless knowledge you accumulated when you're in love with someone could sit for years gathering dust in the back of your mind, only to spill out at the slightest reminder.

Blakney Francis

#4. Like this gas tank, you are overflowing with preconceptions, full of useless knowledge. You hold many facts and opinions, yet know little of yourself. Before you can learn, you'll have to first empty your tank.

Dan Millman

#5. There was never an age in which useless knowledge was more important than in our own.

C.E.M. Joad

#6. There are small bits of useless knowledge which stick to one's brain like barnacles to a boat.

Graham Greene

#7. There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

#8. It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.

Jim Hinckley

#9. Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

Albert J. Nock

#10. Doubt is the tax man pays for the luxury of useless knowledge.

Ivan Panin

#11. Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

Albert J. Nock

#12. It is better to have useless knowledge than to know nothing.

Seneca The Younger

#13. Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

Albert J. Nock

#14. Almost all men are infected with the disease of desiring to obtain useless knowledge,

Tony Reinke

#15. There's no such thing as useless knowledge. You never know what doors it's going to open up for you.

Benjamin Carson

#16. The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.

Albert J. Nock

#17. The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#18. Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.

Abu Bakr

#19. Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Carlos Castaneda

#20. There's nothing more useless than a mind filled with someone else's thoughts.

Laurie Gray

#21. Knowledge is a house that must be built from the ground up. We know how to make the roof. The information is useless if we don't understand the foundations on which it is to be placed.

Nancy Farmer

#22. Knowledge is the treasure of the mind, but discretion is the key to it, without which it is useless. The practical part of wisdom is the best.

Owen Feltham

#23. To minds tormented by the divine thirst, it is useless to offer the most certain knowledge of the laws of numbers and the arrangement of the universe

Etienne Gilson

#24. Knowledge without practice is useless. Practice
without knowledge is dangerous.

Confucius

#25. I ain't one of those who believe that a half knowledge of a subject is useless, but it has been my experience that when a fellow has that half knowledge he finds it's the other half which would really come in handy.

George Horace Lorimer

#26. No knowledge is useless, with the exception of heraldry.

Samuel Johnson

#27. Knowing about your past lives is worse than useless if that knowledge doesn't bring you some kind of positive change or healing.

Lianne Downey

#28. Knowledge without understanding is useless.

Thucydides

#29. Why then should women be denied the benefits of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God almighty would never have given them capacities.

Daniel Defoe

#30. A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Henry David Thoreau

#31. Knowledge is useless until it's coupled with action.

Susan Cain

#32. Head knowledge without heart knowledge is worse than useless; but when head and heart join forces, it changes our lives forever.

David Jeremiah

#33. Only small men parade their learning, talk over their audience and air their superior knowledge. Only brutal men throw their strength about, and vain rich men display their wealth in ostentatious useless luxuries.

John Myer

#34. We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason; if some few get above their nurses instructions, our knowledge must rest concealed and be as useless to the world as gold in the mine.

Mary Wortley Montagu

#35. In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy ... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?

Humphry Davy

#36. Remember that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.

Samuel Johnson

#37. Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.

P.C. Cast

#38. When we were young, we understood all sweet things; and we could detect the sweets of a fairy story by an unerring science of our own. We never cared for such useless things as knowledge. We only cared for truth.

Rabindranath Tagore

#39. He must have gotten all that knowledge from the newspapers. I don't see the point, collecting all that knowledge others have already discovered.

Janne Teller

#40. Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#41. If you see your nature, you don't need to read sutras or invoke buddhas. Erudition and knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness. Doctrines are only for pointing to the mind. Once you see your mind, why pay attention to doctrines?

Bodhidharma

#42. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur.

Samuel Johnson

#43. Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.

Chandler Burr

#44. Without power, knowledge is useless. without knowledge, faith is tyranny. Without understanding, humanity is blind, and without all four, it is doomed.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#45. Man alone, it seems, lives all his life in the knowledge of death. And yet there is more to life than merely waiting for death. For life to have meaning, there must be a purpose. A man must pass something on - otherwise he is useless. "For most men that purpose revolves around marriage and children

David Gemmell

#46. They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don't know how to find it, if you don't even know where to begin to look. - on librarians

Patrick Ness

#47. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But

Yuval Noah Harari

#48. It is useless to deny that, unless one has a genius for imparting knowledge, teaching is a drudgery.

Margaret Deland

#49. Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Samuel Johnson

#50. A day without gratitude, kindness, and compassion,
is a day full of useless action.

Debasish Mridha

#51. The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.

Virginia Postrel

#52. A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.

Lafcadio Hearn

#53. Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Samuel Johnson

#54. Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask.

Robin Wasserman

#55. This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Yuval Noah Harari

#56. Rich in material, but Devoid of Knowledge is like having an antique Clock with no numbers. Appealing to the eye, but Useless in the modern world.

Andrea L'Artiste

#57. Merely gathering knowledge may become the most useless work a man can do. What can you do to help and heal the world? That is the educational test.

Henry Ford

#58. I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.

Luc De Clapiers

#59. In physiology, as in all other sciences, no discovery is useless, no curiosity misplaced or too ambitious, and we may be certain that every advance achieved in the quest of pure knowledge will sooner or later play its part in the service of man.

Ernest Starling

#60. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

Andre Dubus

#61. Knowing something and acting on it are not the same thing. Knowledge without the application of what has been learned is useless.

Peter James West

#62. Vejur was everything that Spock had ever dreamed of becoming. And yet Vejur was barren! It would never feel pain. Or joy. Or challenge. It was so completely and magnificently logical that its accumulation of knowledge was totally useless.

Gene Roddenberry

#63. Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.

Abdul Kalam

#64. Once a kata has been learned, it must be practised repeatedly until it can be applied in an emergency, for knowledge of just the sequence of a kata in karate is useless.

Gichin Funakoshi

#65. Credentials and classrooms are useless unless they lead us toward consciously applying knowledge to improve the quality of our community.

Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti

#66. If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labour for a thing that will be useless in our hands.

John Locke

#67. Regret doesn't make sense to me. I have none. Because I realize that what I do at any given moment, is my decision to make, already accepting either benefit or consequence of that action. So, regret is a useless word, and knowledge is the result.

Gypsie M. Holley

#68. Many men are stored full of unused knowledge. Like loaded guns that are never fired off, or military magazines in times of peace, they are stuffed with useless ammunition.

Henry Ward Beecher

#69. Books without the knowledge of life are useless.

Samuel Johnson

#70. Knowledge is a matter of knowing facts. Wisdom is a matter of understanding and applying principles. A certain amount of knowledge is necessary for wisdom, and without wisdom, knowledge is not only useless, it's dangerous.

Hilda Van Stockum

#71. We never cared for such useless things as knowledge. We only cared for truth. And our unsophisticated little hearts knew well where the Crystal Palace of Truth lay and how to reach it. But to-day we are expected to write pages of facts, while the truth is simply this: "There was a king.

Rabindranath Tagore

#72. Wisdom is knowledge applied. Head knowledge is useless on the battlefield. Knowledge stamped on the heartmmakes one wise

Beth Moore

#73. You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.

John Ruskin

#74. Knowledge gained is as useless as pride
if filed away and never applied.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#75. Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

Michel Foucault

#76. I gave up trying to find out. Any knowledge I might gain was useless. I had no means of controlling where I was going - no rudder, no sails, no motor, some oars, but insufficient brawn.

Yann Martel

#77. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." "But the Solar System!" I protested.

Arthur Conan Doyle