Usefully Quotes

#1. I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more.
(Letter to John Banister, Jr., June 19, 1787)

Thomas Jefferson

#2. I would rather have it said, 'He lived usefully,' than, 'He died rich.'

Benjamin Franklin

#3. Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#4. Time is Priceless, we only get it one Time, use it usefully for togetherness, profit and Happiness.

Jan Jansen

#5. The law increasing and organizing the military establishment of the United States has been nearly carried into effect, and the Army has been extensively and usefully employed during the past season.

Martin Van Buren

#6. One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

Thomas Jefferson

#7. I'm very close to suggesting that Mr. Pitt has now served as long as he can usefully do so. He seems to take his foot out of his mouth only for purposes of changing feet.

John Dingell

#8. A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity; nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed, than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations.

Samuel Johnson

#9. Almighty Father! let thy lowly child,
Strong in his love of truth, be wisely bold,
A patriot bard, by sycophants reviled.
Let him live usefully, and not die old!

Ebenezer Elliott

#10. People think that they think things, and they also think that they know things. They could usefully give some attention to the question of whether they know what they think and know what they think they know.

Idries Shah

#11. Great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously.

Michel De Montaigne

#12. A technological revolution on the farm has led to an output explosion
but we have not yet learned to harness that explosion usefully, while protecting our farmers' right to full parity income

John F. Kennedy

#13. Khadi will cease to have any value in my eyes if it does not usefully employ the millions.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. Although separating mitochondria and microsomes might appear worlds apart from the determination of the molecular weight of macromolecules, certain concepts were common to the two operations and could be usefully transposed from the latter to the former.

Christian De Duve

#15. There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

Samuel Johnson

#16. The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.

Edgar Allan Poe

#17. At a certain point, professors stopped being usefully sensitive and became more like careful retailers who have it as a cardinal point of doctrine never to piss the customer off.

Mark Edmundson

#18. There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.

S.J Perelman

#19. This is not the place to anticipate the discussion, but two things may usefully be said. First, all but the most sanguine pluralists admit that there are immense dangers ahead and that signs of cultural decay abound.

D. A. Carson

#20. I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess.

Edgar Allan Poe

#21. Whether I'm writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.

Heidi Julavits

#22. TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.

Neil Postman

#23. To contribute usefully to the advance of science, one must sometimes not disdain from undertaking simple verifications.

Leon Foucault

#24. It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.

Ian McEwan

#25. He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.

Frances Wright

#26. What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.

John Stuart Mill

#27. What then am I? In the end, all we have is simply what we find, and what we can usefully say to each other about what we find is all that needs to be said. And perhaps, in the end, it's best just to sit quietly and let go of that thought too.

Murray Shanahan

#28. Very clever implementation techniques are required to implement this insanity correctly and usefully, not to mention that code written with this feature used and abused east and west is exceptionally exciting to debug.

Erik Naggum

#29. There is, in part, the glamour of science, which, since it is so spectacularly and usefully right over so many things, is often given authority where it has none.

Raymond Tallis

#30. I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

A.J. Ayer

#31. Love requires that true education should be easily accessible to all and should be of use to every villager in this daily life. The emphasis laid on the principle of spending every minute of one's life usefully is the best education for citizenship.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

Robert Scholes

#33. Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

Thomas Pynchon

#34. In order to love people usefully you need to be focused on them and not yourself.

Richard Templar

#35. Travelling ... when men of sober age travel, they gather knowlege which they may apply usefully for their country

Thomas Jefferson

#36. True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the profound desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God.

Bill Wilson

#37. It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story The Book-Bag.

Robin McKinley

#38. No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.

Therese Fowler

#39. Christianity does not remove you from the world and its problems; it makes you fit to live in it, triumphantly and usefully.

Charles Templeton