Selected utility quotes

1. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

2. Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but 'vector' is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

3. The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

4. A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.'

5. If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

6. Of all the works of man I like best Those which have been used. The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges The knives and forks whose wooden handles Have been worn away by many hands: such forms Seemed to me the noblest.

7. Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

8. No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.

9. There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.

10. Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

11. The only question with wealth is, what do you do with it?

12. Better is half a loaf than no bread.

13. Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

14. Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.

15. Take what you can use and let the rest go by.

16. The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.

17. Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.

18. I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

19. Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?

20. Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us.

21. Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.

22. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.

23. I invented the cordless extension cord.

24. My grandfather gave me a watch. It doesn't have any hands or numbers. He says it's very accurate. I asked him what time it was. You can guess what he told me.

25. For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival.

26. A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

27. Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

28. It has served us well, this myth of Christ.

29. Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with 'usefulness' and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.

30. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was: nothingness.

31. Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.

32. Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.

33. Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

34. Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

35. Make the most of the hemp seed and sow it everywhere.

36. If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.

37. Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.

38. She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification -- for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

39. My talismans are not obviously useless.

40. The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, - either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.

41. Gross utility kills beauty. We now have all over the world huge production of things, huge organizations, huge administrations of empire- all obstructing the path of life. Civilization is waiting for a great consummation, for an expression of its soul in beauty. This must be your contribution to the world.

42. Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.[2]

43. Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

44. Truth therefore and utility are here the very same thing:

45. The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.

46. The Benthamic standard of 'the greatest happiness' was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like 'the law of nature,' 'right reason,' 'the moral sense,' 'natural rectitude,' and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.

47. What do you want to have me shot for, Semyon Mikhailovich? If you don't find me suitable as chief of the operations department, then give me a combat division. I am a commander; I can command a division. But what would be the advantage of having me shot?

48. Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

49. Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense.

50. There has to be a woman, but not much of a one. A good horse is much more important.

51. Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

52. Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

53. 'By the Lion's Mane, a strange device,' said King Peter, 'to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!' (ch. 17)

54. In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the question cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil.

55. After a few days, Willie got tired of [the water-wheel] - and no blame to him, for it was no earthly use beyond amusement, and that which can only amuse can never amuse long. I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?

56. A very great memory often forgotteth how much time is lost by repeating things of no use.

57. You know I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters?

58. My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

59. Fire is the most tolerable third party.

60. The fatal futility of Fact.

61. From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.

62. Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

63. Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory...

64. So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay. (470)

65. Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

66. Knowledge has no value except that which can be gained by its application.

67. The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time - you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing.

68. Of course not ... but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.

69. This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.

70. A good poet is of no more use to his country than a good petanque player.

71. A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

72. Many receive advice, few profit by it.

73. Justifying space exploration because we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good exercise for the violinist's right arm.

74. Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

75. Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup.

76. It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education, than education without the sense. Boys and girls should be educated to help themselves. They should be taught that it is disgraceful to be idle, and dishonorable to be useless.

77. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: 'It's clever, but is it Art?'

78. Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

79. I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it.

80. Abuse does not rule out use.