Unnecessary Quotes - Page 17

• People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.

  Young-Ha Kim

  People, Meaning Of Life, Pruning

  Young-ha Kim (2007). “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

  Art Spiegelman

  Hands, Silence, Stains

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• The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of man who have folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

  Adam Smith

  Exercise, Men, Hands

  Adam Smith, Bruce Mazlish (2003). “The Wealth of Nations: Representative Selections”, p.167, Courier Corporation

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• I don't want unnecessary violence, sergeant," said Blouse. "Right you are, sir!" said the sergeant. "Carborundum! First man comes through that door runnin', I want him nailed to the wall!" He caught the lieutenant's eye, and added: "But not too hard!

  Terry Pratchett

  Wall, Eye, Men

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Monstrous Regiment: (Discworld Novel 31)”, p.136, Random House

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• I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Beautiful, Fall, Sacrifice

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• I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Philosophy, Men

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• People say that the monetary system produces incentive.  This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering.  You have to look at the entire picture.

  Jacque Fresco

  Jealousy, War, Anger

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• My favourite subject at school was avoiding unnecessary work.

  Prince Philip

  School, Favourite, Avoiding

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• It's unnecessary and destructive to think of oneself at all. People ask me, 'What do you think of yourself as?' My answer is, 'Nothing.

  Paul Bowles

  Thinking, People, Ego

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• While sincerity and over-anxiety can spoil a picture, through superfluous elaboration and unnecessary correction, the carelessness that would leave it in an unfinished state is even more reprehensible.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Anxiety, Finishing, Sincerity

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• You will learn to paint trees only by understanding them, their growth, their nature, their movement - and realizing that they are conscious living things. A tree seldom if ever encroaches upon the liberty of another tree. It never wastes its growth in unnecessary twistings.

  John F. Carlson

  Tree, Understanding, Growth

  John F. Carlson (2013). “Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting”, p.94, Courier Corporation

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• The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen…you will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean. Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.

  Robert Toombs

  War, Ocean, Mountain

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• The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

  Evan Wright

  Incompetent, Unwilling

  Evan Wright (2005). “Generation Kill”, p.23, Penguin

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• Negotiating sugar trade in bilateral free trade agreements is a recipe for disaster for the U.S. sugar industry, and it is unnecessary.

  Kent Conrad

  Agreement, Recipes, Sugar

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• I don't like people waiting on me. I feel it is an unnecessary expense.

  Randeep Hooda

  People, Waiting, Expenses

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• Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Short Life, America, Customs

  Wilfrid Sheed (1978). “The good word & other words”, Dutton Adult

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• How to figure out the recipe of your life? Your body knows when it needs food. And it asks for it. But if your devouring self keeps asking for more food, pounds of unnecessary problems are added to your life.

  Ruben Papian

  Self, Recipes, Pounds

  Ruben Papian (2013). “How to Wish”, p.26

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• Politeness only teaches us to save others from unnecessary pain.... You are not bound by politeness to tell any falsehoods.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Pain, Teach, Politeness

  Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1825). “Works of Maria Edgeworth: Modern Griselda. Moral tales. 1825”, p.83

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• Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.

  Louis Pasteur

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

  Address at the "Sorbonne Scientific Soirée" on April 07, 1864. "The Life of Pasteur". Book by René Vallery-Radot, translated by R .L. Devonshire, p. 140, archive.org. 1902.

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• There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the truth about the most important things and the opinion that there is no truth about them. Both of these opinions are fatal to philosophy; the first asserts that the quest for truth is unnecessary, while the second asserts that it is impossible. The Socratic knowledge of ignorance, which I take to be the beginning point of all philosophy, defines the sensible middle ground between two extremes.

  Allan Bloom

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Two

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Western Civ," p. 18, 1990.

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• Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectableasthe Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Men, Thinking, Church

  1878 An Inland Voyage,'At Maubeuge'.

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• True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.

  Herman Melville

  Work, Humanity, Wicked

  Herman Melville, Lynn Horth (1993). “Correspondence”, p.464, Northwestern University Press

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• No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pain, Reality, Roots

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• For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Dragons, Challenges

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

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• Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

  William James

  Lying, Character, Men

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.83, 谷月社

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