Useless Quotes - Page 40

• To a large extent, the aged in our society are ghettoized. Old people are seen as useless, bypassed by history, old-fashioned, in the way. So, not surprisingly, when we reach the official mark of old age, we're supposed to go gently into that good night, to get off center stage and hand over the spotlight. Old age is also surrounded by shame - the myth of impotence and inability.

  Sam Keen

  Good Night, Hands, People

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Real, Mean, Simple

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

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• What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

  Peter Drucker

  Effectiveness, Confusion, Done

  Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review (2016). “The Peter F. Drucker Reader: Selected Articles from the Father of Modern Management Thinking”, p.33, Harvard Business Review Press

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• You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Character, Evil, Doe

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• Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.

  Fay Weldon

  Memories, Lying, Heart

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• Whatever alleged 'truth' is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Philosophy, Darkness, Fiction

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• Preparing for battle, plans were essential. But once the battle was joined, plans were useless.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Battle, Essentials, Plans

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• The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day...What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know.

  Joseph O'Connor

  Girl, War, School

  Joseph O'Connor (1994). “The secret world of the Irish male”

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• Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

  Jacques Barzun

  Cutting, Air, Symphony

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• Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

  Donald Hall

  Hurt, Addiction, Important

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• I don't need a Rolls-Royce, I don't need a house in the country, I don't need to live in the south of France. I'm quite happy as I am.

  John Lydon

  Country, Hero, Mean

  "What's up? Docs!" by Sam Delaney, www.theguardian.com. June 3, 2005.

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• All the talent in the world is useless without perseverance.

  Steve Morse

  Perseverance, World, Talent

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• The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.

  Caroline Knapp

  Keys, Latter, Insight

  Caroline Knapp (2004). “Appetites: Why Women Want”, p.191, Counterpoint Press

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• I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Thinking, Apaches

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• Texans ignore "better," long ago forgot the useless word "good." Everything in Texas is "best."

  Edward Smith

  Texas, Long Ago, Texan

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• The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.

  George R. R. Martin

  Men, Nipples

  George R. R. Martin (2012). “George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones 5-Book Boxed Set (Song of Ice and Fire Series): A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and and A Dance with Dragons”, p.2509, Bantam

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• Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Art, Men, Perfect

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Life is a useless passion.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Passion, Life Is

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• I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Sorry, Self, Daddy

  Gabrielle Zevin (2011). “All These Things I've Done”, p.172, Macmillan

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• There was something striking about a single key. It was like a question waiting to be answered, a whole missing a half. Useless on its own, needing something else to be truly defined.

  Sarah Dessen

  Keys, Waiting, Missing

  Sarah Dessen (2008). “Lock and Key”, p.182, Penguin

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• Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.

  Shin Kyung-sook

  Mom, Heart, Thinking

  Kyung-Sook Shin (2011). “Please Look After Mom”, p.260, Vintage

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• I do not wish you much happiness--it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Philosophy, Bores You, People

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• Emperors are vain and useless things.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Useless Things, Vain, Emperor

  Scott Westerfeld (2011). “Scott Westerfeld: Leviathan Trilogy: Leviathan; Behemoth; Goliath”, p.1110, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things..." He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow. "There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.

  Anne Rice

  Hurt, Stars, Believe

  Anne Rice (2013). “The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle”, p.861, Ballantine Books

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• In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

  Peter Straub

  Cities, Wings, Quality

  FaceBook post by Peter Straub from Nov 19, 2015

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