Useless Quotes - Page 5

• I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

  Junichiro Tanizaki

  Wall, Dark, Light

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• Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

  Storm Jameson

  Regret, Past, Long

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• It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason as to administer medication to the dead.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Use, Arguing, Reason

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• Most animal experimentation is useless.

  Henry Heimlich

  Animal, Cruelty, Experimentation

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• Openness without strength is useless; strength without openness is oppression.

  Daniele Bolelli

  Oppression, Openness

  Daniele Bolelli (2013). “Create Your Own Religion: A How-To Book without Instructions”, p.108, Red Wheel Weiser

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• Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it.

  Henry Jacob Bigelow

  Failure, Character, Successful

  "Surgical Anaesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers". Pp. 369-370. Book by Henry Jacob Bigelow, 1894.

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• Bearing in his right paw the shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances, cut the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war; His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display - indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma.

  Gary Snyder

  War, Cutting, Animal

  Gary Snyder (2009). “Back on the Fire: Essays”, p.125, Counterpoint

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• If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers.

  Alfred de Musset

  Flower, Eye, Heart

  "Narration; The confession of a child of the century".

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• The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Doors, Land, Office

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• All of the great ideas, without action, become stale and useless. The key to turning dreams into reality is action. People who have great ideas are a dime a dozen. People who act on their dreams and ideas are the select few, but they are the ones who gain the wealth, wealth and wisdom that is available. Someone will act today. Let it be you.

  Jim Rohn

  Dream, Reality, Keys

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• Grace is within you. If it were external, it would be useless.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Self, Grace, Would Be

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• Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Half, Gothic

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• To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Crush, Work, Character

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• 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

  Beautiful, Ignorance, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.361, Simon and Schuster

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• The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice; it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.

  Learned Hand

  Blood, Law, Justice

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• Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

  Victor Hugo

  Wish, Extravagance, Dry

  Victor Hugo (1863). “Les misérables”

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• Your cable television is experiencing difficulties. Please do not panic. Resist the temptation to read or talk to loved ones. Do not attempt sexual relations, as years of TV radiation have left your genitals withered and useless.

  Matt Groening

  Years, Temptation, Television

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• A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.

  Walter Lippmann

  Sleep, Men, Cradle

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

  George Eliot

  Women, Sorrow, Would Be

  'Felix Holt' (1866) ch. 2

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• All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Handicapped

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1989). “Criticisms, Reflections, and Maxims of Goethe”, Richard West

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• Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

  Oscar Wilde

  Law, Resolution, Interfere

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.253, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

  Edith Wharton

  Thinking, Class, America

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• First, I hate all theological controversy: it is wearing to the temper, and is I believe (at all events when viva voce) worse than useless.

  Lewis Carroll

  Hate, Believe, Events

  Lewis Carroll, Morton Norton Cohen, Roger Lancelyn Green (1979). “The letters of Lewis Carroll”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• To have money is to be virtuous, honest, beautiful and witty And to be without is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless.

  Jean Giraudoux

  Beautiful, Witty, Money

  Jan Austell, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder (1971). “The play as theater”

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• 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

  Sex, Women, Understanding

  An Essay upon Projects "Of Academies: An Academy forWomen" (1697)

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