Top 100 Quotes About Useless Things
#2. There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Henry James
#3. Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.
Orson Scott Card
#4. Maybe I am a coward. In facts, it is much better than open my big mouth and say useless things.
Shim Steward
#5. If there was a National Tweaker Olympics, Oregon would bring home the gold in every category (Living in Squalor, Poisoning Your Neighbors, Developing Facial Scabs, Public Aggression, Theft of Useless Things, Taking Stuff Apart, and Crazy Talking).
Laurie Notaro
#6. 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
#7. ALWAYS FULL OF QUESTIONS ... How many times must I tell you, better to listen than to talk. But you're always talking ... asking useless things ... whatever for?"
"Because I want to know.
Arlene J. Chai
#8. It is of course better to know useless things than to know nothing.
Seneca.
#9. We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.
George Eliot
#10. Words are pretty, useless things - butterflies behind glass. You may feel warm and bright as you stare at their beauty but you'll walk away empty and cold, clutching nothing but the painful realization that you never really had anything at all.
Julie Johnson
#11. He been a good man always, I think, but this tenderness was new. It was the tenderness of an old man who had been busy all his life but now had time to pay attention to useless things. But it was more than that . . . a suffering he neither complained of nor denied.
Wendell Berry
#12. The world needed more fireworks- especially now that there was going to be a shortage of beautiful, useless things.
Scott Westerfeld
#14. 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
#15. I know a lot about a few things - mostly useless things.
Mo Rocca
#16. Cats are great. They don't talk about useless things. Or do them. Nothing is cuter. They are something that don't exist in my world. They have pets over there as well ... but ... it doesn't quite compare.
Yana Toboso
#17. 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
#18. Tears are useless things; tiny droplets of salt infused water, insignificant and pitiful.
Pippa DaCosta
#19. I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!
Romola Garai
#20. I hate the Internet. It's full of rubbish. I'm on it all the time, watching terrible, useless things and ossifying my brain.
Peter Capaldi
#21. I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!
...
I, the solemn investigator of useless things...
Fernando Pessoa
#22. A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?
Rene Daumal
#23. Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man, or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling, and useless things, than they deserve.
Plato
#24. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.
Stephen Fry
#25. Do you ask what is the foundation of a sound mind? It is, not to find joy in useless things.
Seneca.
#26. True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#27. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#28. I Have Learned Why People Work So Hard To Succeed: It Is Because They Envy The Things Their Neighbors Have. But It Is Useless. It Is Like Chasing The Wind ... It Is Better To Have Only A Little, With Peace Of Mind, Than Be Busy All The Time With Both Hands, Trying To Catch The Wind
Anonymous
#29. There are two Newman's laws. The first one is "It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." The second is "Just when things look darkest, they go black.
Paul Newman
#30. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.
Gustave Flaubert
#31. All fear has ever done is hold me back. I have so many things I want to accomplish in my life. For myself and for the world. Fear is useless; it just gets in the way of accomplishing everything Overcome fear today and and confront one of your phobias.
Demi Lovato
#32. Don't live in regret! It is such a useless idea.
Use the memory to prevent us do bad things!
Regret is a childish wish, or an empty hope,
trying to revise the bitter memory of the past.
Toba Beta
#33. Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.
Henry Ford
#34. I had the feeling deep in my gut that there'd been lines I should have spoken, gestures I should have made, that would have made things better. But looking back, I didn't know what they were. As a friend, I was pretty much useless, apparently.
Megan Crewe
#35. Worry is useless mulling over of things we cannot change. Worry is not concern, which would motivate you to do everything possible in a situation.
Peace Pilgrim
#36. Remember who you are. Realize what you are. Do both those things, or you'll either be completely useless-or too dangerous to help anyone.
Sarah Fine
#37. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
John Ruskin
#38. This is life. Things get taken away. You will learn to start over many times
or you will be useless.
Mitch Albom
#39. Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age
the only perfectly beautiful things on earth
joyous, innocent, half divine
useless, say they who are wiser than God.
Ouida
#40. AS WITH ALL TRULY wild things, care is necessary in approaching them. Stealth is useless. Wild things recognize stealth for what it is, a lie and a trap. While wild things might play games of stealth, and in doing so may even occasionally fall prey to stealth, they are never truly caught by it.
Patrick Rothfuss
#41. Thee are such horrible weapons. And so no sane leader would ever want to cross that line to using nuclear weapons. And, if you are not going to cross that line, then these things are basically useless.
Colin Powell
#42. It's useless to criticize things that people love and something that speaks to them.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#43. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut
#44. 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
#45. Men are essentially useless for the difficult things in life. For births and deaths, one clearheaded woman is more useful than a half-dozen men.
Laura Bickle
#46. Boredom, that traitorous devil that posseses us to do things sometimes useless, and often stupid.
Apol Lejano-Massebieau
#47. It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time.
Robin Hobb
#48. Clutter is what happens to things when they become useless but friendly.
Russell Lynes
#49. Without God, all we do in life, no matter how great or significant, will pass and is useless. Only the things with Jesus at the center will bring true peace and happiness to both mankind and the world at large.
Leon Lutje
#50. I love things that are absurd, useless, impossible, frantic, excessive, and intense, because they provoke me, because I feel them like thorns in my flesh.
Emile Verhaeren
#51. Beautiful things should not be kept behind glass, they should be used. Just as beautiful women should live fully and not let herself turn into a hothouse flower, pampered and useless.
Lisa Cach
#52. There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#53. Being the Magician isn't about being powerful when you have things and useless when you don't," Persephone said.
"The Magician sees what is out there and finds connections. The Magician can make anything magical.
Maggie Stiefvater
#54. Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.
Haruki Murakami
#55. I feel now it's useless to keep hoping. The way things are today, we live in a world that needs laughter, and I've decided if I can make people laugh, I'm making a more important contribution.
Paul Lynde
#56. Useless and precious objects. Taking up space. Taking up time.
Maira Kalman
#57. there were few things in the world more useless than an empty gun.
Evan Currie
#58. Adam had never been powerful in his life.
Being the magician isn't about being powerful when you have things and useless when you don't. The magician sees what is out there and finds connections. The magician can make anything magical.
Now, are you the magician? Or aren't you?
Maggie Stiefvater
#59. Pretty things can be useless, and ugly things can be useful. Beauty and quality are not always related.
Abby Covert
#60. As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult. Rational debate will prove useless.
Chris Hedges
#61. He should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#62. Monsieur Josserand died very quietly - a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings that he had ever loved.
Emile Zola
#63. During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
H.L. Mencken
#64. Pity is such an awful, useless emotion- you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself.The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse.
Paul Auster
#65. Useful men, who do useful things, don't mind being treated as useless.
But the useless always judge themselves as being important and hide all their incompetence behind authority.
Paulo Coelho
#66. We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless.
Randolph Bourne
#67. And part of him, a compact, dark lump of meanness buried deep in his chest, had been glad. Let her feel useless. Let her feel like a failure. Let her see that he could do things she never could.
Kiersten White
#68. You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#69. Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
Donald Hall
#70. The problem we have in the world is that most people don't take the time to develop themselves, even though they'll readily spend that time on many useless and irrelevant things.
King Samuel Benson
#71. It becomes necessary to learn how to clear the mind of all clouds, to free it of all useless ballast and debris by dismissing the burden of too much concern with material things.
Indra Devi
#72. I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you.
Charles Bukowski
#73. A creative photographer is one who either captures mystery or reveals things, everything else is useless
Raghu Rai
#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. Attack anything that makes you feel unworthy, inadequate, hopeless, powerless and useless. That is the evidence of the enemy. All those things need to be attacked with joy, with peace, with love and grace, with mercy, with kindness and the goodness of God.
Graham Cooke
#77. Words, one may argue, are such a drag, useless - don't think it too much, just do it. And no - I agree - over-thinking is a curse, but it is without words when I over-think, when I over-burn neurons. With words, things find their place. I've said this to myself a million times.
Lange Weile
#78. Why study things of no use? To learn you don't need it and concentrate your efforts on what is important to you.
J.R. Rim
#79. The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
Karl Marx
#80. There are two things that we should avoid, oh disciple! A life of pleasures, that is low and vain. A life of mortification, that is useless and vain.
Gautama Buddha
#81. ...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.
Barbara Pym
#82. Denounce useless guilt. Don't make a cult of suffering. Live in the now(or at least the soon). Always do the things you fear most. Courage is an acquired taste like caviar. Trust all joy. If the evil eye fixes you in its gaze, look elsewhere. Get ready to be 87.
Erica Jong
#83. Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre
Leo Tolstoy
#84. Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Nancy Gibbs
#85. I'm not an easy person to love. There are lots of times when I'm a very good boyfriend, but there are times when I'm useless. I mean, I'm a mess around the house. I talk nonstop. I become obsessed with things.
Daniel Radcliffe
#86. Worry is a useless mulling over of things we cannot change.
Peace Pilgrim
#87. It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.
Pythagoras
#89. Like other beautiful things in this world, its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.
John Ruskin
#90. War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)
Sebastian Junger
#91. Being salt and light demands two things: we practice purity in the midst of a fallen world and yet we live in proximity to this fallen world. If you don't hold up both truth in tension, you invariably becomes useless and separated from the world God loves.
David Kinnaman
#92. Tell me things I won't mind forgetting, she said. 'Make it useless stuff or skip it.
Amy Hempel
#93. Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?
Carlos Castaneda
#94. As for my memory, I have a particularly good one. I never keep any record of my investigations or experiments. My memory files all these things away conveniently and reliably. I should say, though, that I didn't cumber it up with a lot of useless matter.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
#95. It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
Marvin Minsky
#96. When you see and feel the sensations you are experiencing as sensations, pure and simple, you may see that these thoughts about the sensation are useless to you at that moment and that they can actually make things worse than they need be.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#97. A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain De Botton
#98. I'm not great around the house, I'm pretty useless. I do little bits, but I never quite finish tidying up - I'll start, but I'll leave things unwashed in the sink. It has been known to irritate people somewhat.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
#99. All I'm doing is carrying you around, and making a fool of myself. I'm useless. I'm not helping anyone.'
'Clove Sutcliffe, you are doing things no human has ever done before. You are groundbreaking. You are unique. Do not cease to function due to inappropriate emotional weakness.
Lauren James
#100. A couple in love is like a pair of scissors. Two useless pieces of metal, until they are inextricably connected at the core so that they can move together as one and accomplish great things.
Jack Canfield
