Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.

There are no lessons so useful as those learned in the school of affliction.

I always find it often useful and wonderful that how when you are putting it down on paper with a clear statement of the case, it turns out to be the most useful one every time.

Do not beat up on yourself. Do not criticize your writing as lousy, inadequate, stupid, or any of the evil epithets that you are used to heaping on yourself. Such self-bashing is never useful. If you indulge in it, your writing doesn’t stand a chance. So when your mind turns on you, turn it back, stamp it down, shut it up, and keep writing.

Only Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly

There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man’s needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet

Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter

Go on and finish your studies,” Gore said. “You are poor enough, but there are greater evils than poverty. Live on no man’s favor. What bread you do eat, let it be the bread of independence. Pursue your profession. Make yourself useful to your friends and a little formidable to your enemies, and you have nothing to fear.

The moral is perhaps that intellect and being well-read have no innate value to a contented or useful life. The number of hardbacks on your bedside table is in inverse proportion to the number of arched backs in your bed.

Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.

Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off

Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say, and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.

I have learned to hold all things loosely, so God will not have to pry them out of my hands.

If all things are possible with God, then all things are possible to him who believes in Him.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

Sometimes the dead can be more useful than the living.

The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realize the Self.

The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.

The power of accurate observation…is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil

Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own

Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own

The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is

Nature does nothing uselessly.

There is but one dependable method of accumulating and legally holding riches, and that is by providing useful service.

The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It’s useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.

A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly. They’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced

It is useless attacking the insensible

Every one is more or less master of his own fate

If you allow men to use you for your own purposes, they will use you for theirs

The most useful pot is the pot which has been broken

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.

Only those who respect the personality of others can be of real use to them

Every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary

Everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves

Our invisible work at the improvement of our soul is the most important work in the world, and all other visible kinds of work are useful only when we do this major work.