Useful Quotes

#1. 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

#2. You may have learned from your mother or any other hunted woman. Smiling at devils is a useful learned thing. Swallowing discomfort down in spades. Holding it tight in your belly. Ageing on the inside only. Keeping it forever sexy.

Yrsa Daley-Ward

#3. Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis.

William Burroughs

#4. Because of styles people are separated. Research your own experience, absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.

Bruce Lee

#5. A truth may be useful without being understood, indeed without being believed.

Frank Durham

#6. I'm always interested in understanding the math of things and understanding as much as I can about all aspects of business. And what I learn today may be useful to me two years from now. That'sreally the wonderful thing about investments is your knowledge is cumulative.

Warren Buffett

#7. That's the thing about death that makes it useful. Death was always a reminder to the living to live - to live in the present and to look forward to the future.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#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. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)

Kate Atkinson

#10. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.

George Mason

#11. Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

Elizabeth Warren

#12. To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear

Marilynne Robinson

#13. There is something more here than embarrassment at being praised. The strengths 'I' have are not admissible to the arena of ability where they are socially useful; for once admitted, 'I'
my real self
would no longer have them.

Richard Sennett

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.

Kelly Link

#17. It's not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it's going to be useful. You have to create stuff that people really want, rather than create stuff just because you can.

Genevieve Bell

#18. 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

#19. The true science of martial arts means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time, and to teach them in such a way that they will be useful in all things.

Miyamoto Musashi

#20. Chubs is useful," I reminded her. "Please try not to kill him."
"Yeah, yeah we'll see. All I'm saying is, accidents happen.

Alexandra Bracken

#21. 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

#22. He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader. That is the sort of book that will make money for the publisher, cross the seas, and extend the fame of the author.

Horace

#23. 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

#24. It was a useful reminder that all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing.

Nelson Mandela

#25. Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

Clive Granger

#26. Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly.

Theophile Gautier

#27. We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

Fernando Pessoa

#28. A lighthouse is more useful than a church.

Benjamin Franklin

#29. One of the most useful pieces of advice we've learned in our journalism careers is summed up in the phrase "beware the fallacy of evil men.

Bill Kovach

#30. Confucious and the Madman (excerpt)

The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!
The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.
No one seems to know
How useful it is to be useless.

Thomas Merton

#31. You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.

Ken Livingstone

#32. This thought has met with the fate of many other useful projects, of being applauded and neglected.

Voltaire

#33. Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

Gary Weiss

#34. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

Bertrand Russell

#35. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

J.K. Rowling

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.

Ludwig Von Mises

#39. Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#40. Most of what is now "bitter" for our old nature is going to be useful for our nature

Sunday Adelaja

#41. Among the aimless, unsuccessful or worthless, you often hear talk about 'killing time.' The man who is always killing time is really killing his own chances in life. While the man who is destined to success is the man who makes time live by making it useful.

Arthur Brisbane

#42. As an occupation in declining years, I declare I think saving is useful, amusing and not unbecoming. It must be a perpetual amusement. It is a game that can be played by day, by night, at home and abroad, and at which you must win in the long run ... What an interest it imparts to life!.

William Makepeace Thackeray

#43. Information doesn't deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
it in a useful way.

Jaron Lanier

#44. That night taught me one of life's most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU'RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT!

Nick Hornby

#45. No matter how useful we may be, sometimes it takes us a while to recognize our own value.

Benjamin Hoff

#46. 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

#47. Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful- 1834

William Morris

#48. Happiness is a roadside flower growing on the highways of usefulness; plucked, it shall wither in thy hand; passed by, it is fragrance to thy spirit. Trample the thyme beneath thy feet; be useful, be happy.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

#49. Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us.

Samuel Johnson

#50. The ring! exclaimed Frodo. 'Has he left me that? I wonder why. Still, it may be useful.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#51. The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs.

Samuel Johnson

#52. 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

#53. We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate.

Seth Godin

#54. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.

Charles Lamb

#55. Not my finest hour," he says, shaking his head.
"You realize you did it for no reason," I say. I tell him about talking to my dad and explain that I was crying because of that.
"That information would have been useful BEFORE I shoved him in the pool.

Heather Hepler

#56. Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.

Walter Darby Bannard

#57. With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles ... My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.

Victor Hugo

#58. The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#59. 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

#60. One is only happy in proportion as he makes others feel happy and only useful as he contributes his influences for the finer callings in life.

Milton S. Hershey

#61. Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

Milton H. Erickson

#62. Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.

Bertrand Russell

#63. The theater is who I am - it's where I feel the most inspired, the most at home, the most useful.

Mary-Louise Parker

#64. Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

Rebecca West

#65. What your opponent wants you to think is useful data in figuring out what they think. So get the early draft, okay?

James S.A. Corey

#66. A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is magic. If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.

Alan Cooper

#67. fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.

Daniel M. Gilbert

#68. You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.

George Mikes

#69. The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.

Tom Robbins

#70. Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

George E.P. Box

#71. Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

Susanna Clarke

#72. There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I'm a working man. Perhaps I'm luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good.

Saul Bass

#73. 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

#74. It is great to be introspective, self analysis can be useful, but only if it results in action.

Joe Sacco

#75. The less friendly your relationship is on camera, the more useful it is to be friends with them off camera.

Harry Lloyd

#76. Even the most perfect advice cannot be as useful as a staircase or a rope for those who live in the dark wells!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#77. 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

#78. To love, to be loved, and to be useful: these are the most important elements in a happy, meaningful life, and they can be achieved anywhere.

Syrie James

#79. If all men and women were kept at some useful employment there would be less sorrow and wickedness in the world ...

Dorothy Nevill

#80. The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

Robert Stone

#81. What makes our opponents useful is that they allow us to believe that without them we would be able to realize our goals.

Jean Rostand

#82. I'm sure computers are useful, but next to all these warm, beautiful books they seem so cold and clinical.

J.R. Johansson

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.

Samuel Richardson

#86. Writing songs about it is a really useful way for me to love New York more, and stay observing it, and not just zone it out.

Frankie Cosmos

#87. We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens ...

Johannes Kepler

#88. Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.

Aleister Crowley

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. I found my smattering of German very useful here, indeed, I don't know how I should be able to get on without it.

Bram Stoker

#92. Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Chanakya

#93. It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is a device for the elicitation of altruism.

Andrew Solomon

#94. Short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things ...

Theodore Roosevelt

#95. Convert your time into useful assets

Sunday Adelaja

#96. 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

#97. A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.

Walter Lippmann

#98. I have enough trouble with useful information, never mind being burdened with what is useless.

Erlend Loe

#99. Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

Rick Perlstein

#100. Whether it's veterans' disability claims, infrastructure projects, dam safety, or helping our farmers, what I am focused on is being useful for folks in the Hudson Valley.

Sean Patrick Maloney