Useful Things quotes:

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Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things. -- Nick Park
Things that are complex are not useful, Things that are useful are simple. -- Mikhail Kalashnikov
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. -- Karl Marx
I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing. -- Alice Walker
Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. -- Satya Nadella
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it -- Oscar Wilde
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life. -- T. S. Eliot
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God. -- Victor Hugo
Useful men, who do useful things, don't mind being treated as useless. But the useless always judge themselves as being important and hide all their incompetence behind authority. -- Paulo Coelho
Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II. -- Warren Christopher
Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children. -- Michael Gove
I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit. -- Stephen Dunn
Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you're at the top of the chain, sometimes people won't give you honest feedback because they're afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources. -- Steve Jobs
Organizations like the ACLU fought and won the good fight back in the 1960's, but it's clear that nowadays they've run out of useful things to do since they now spend most of their time defending the scum of the Earth from getting what they rightly deserve. -- Craig Bruce
Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning 'bit' always switched on. -- Satya Nadella
You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention. -- Charlie Munger
The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. -- H. L. Mencken
America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. -- Don DeLillo
In trouble we are prone to forget all that we have heard and read that makes for our comfort. Now what is the reason that a man comes to think of that which otherwise he should never have called to mind? The Holy Spirit brings it to his remembrance; He is a Comforter, bringing to mind useful things at such times when we have most need of them. -- Richard Sibbes
I am a maker of useful things. -- Eva Zeisel
Some things that are true are not very useful. -- Boyd K. Packer
We actually have a real community of people doing useful things. -- Mitchell Baker
It's really useful to travel, if you want to see new things. -- Jules Verne
Some things, it's very useful to begin without knowing fully where you're going. -- Kate Tempest
Don't eat me. I am an inchworm. I am useful. I measure things. -- Leo Lionni
There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement. -- Arthur Phillips
I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well. -- Lee Child
One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful. -- Edith Wharton
It was never shameful to learn from any teacher things that are useful to know. -- Leon Battista Alberti
You want to do things you're passionate about but also are useful to other people. -- Elon Musk
The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful. -- Robert Stone
Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives. -- Philip Kitcher
I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things! -- Romola Garai
Most consequential choices involve shades of gray, and some fog is often useful in getting things done -- Timothy Geithner
All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility. -- Zhuangzi
The important things are not worth knowing because they are useful. They are worth knowing because they are true. -- Andrew Sullivan
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. -- Aldous Huxley
One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity. -- Anna Quindlen
Conjecture as to things useful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle. -- Samuel Johnson
You are curious and quick, you have a deft mind, and for some unaccountable reason, people tell you things -- useful things. -- Deanna Raybourn
Tradition is a fine thing. Nothing comes out of the blue, except perhaps thunderbolts and they are not really very useful things. -- Stacy Aumonier
The ideas of the wise have been tested by centuries. Everything medium is lost and only original, deep and useful things are left. -- Leo Tolstoy
Men value things in three ways: as useful, as pleasant or sources of pleasure, and as excellent, or as intrinsically admirable or honorable. -- Mortimer Adler
The US patent system adds the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things -- Abraham Lincoln
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them. -- A. S. Byatt
Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them. -- A. S. Byatt
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad. -- Thomas Carlyle
If I had not had so much ambition and not tried to do so many things, I probably would have been happier, but less useful. -- Thomas A. Edison
Sadness is one of the best universities in life! Though bad things take good things from us, they do give us useful things as well! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
I'd like to be invisible. To be anonymous and see things for what they really are. The truth may be painful but it's probably useful! -- Marc Jacobs
Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I think people ought to do what they feel useful at the time. If I do things because I ought to do them, I switch off. -- Matthew Macfadyen
The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things. -- E. F. Schumacher
Since I've written many of my books from a less-than-sympathetic viewpoint, I think that being able to see things from all sides is a useful talent. -- Alex Flinn
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. -- Albert Einstein
Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do. -- Matthew Tobin Anderson
Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Union in privacy (with one's wife); boldness; storing away useful items; watchfulness; and not easily trusting others; these five things are to be learned from a crow. -- Chanakya
Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done. -- Joel Spolsky
What trouble have you brought to my doorstep, Beka" she asked. "I don't see where blaming me for things that began months ago will be useful," I replied. -- Tamora Pierce
But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making. -- John Shelton Reed
Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time. -- Alfred Marshall
...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
That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us. -- John Green
People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then? -- Tad Williams
We need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in the society. -- Warren Buffett

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