Useless Objects Quotes & Sayings

Little minds mistake little objects for great ones, and lavish away upon the former that time and attention which only the latterdeserve. To such mistakes we owe the numerous and frivolous tribe of insect-mongers, shell-mongers, and pursuers and driers of butterflies, etc. The strong mind distinguishes, not only between the useful and the useless, but likewise between the useful and the curious. — Lord Chesterfield

And the thing I hate the most is knowing how much hinges on my reaction, how your unburdening can only lead to me being burdened. — David Levithan

I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans
the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blueprint. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress
but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. — Henry Miller

The word "souvenir" has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless; but even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale. — Alan Coren

I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the worldview that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, to take pleasure in solid objects and scrapes of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us. — George Orwell

Char bought a pack of clove cigarettes, claiming they tasted good, to which I ask why doesn't she just go suck on a clove so I don't have to inhale her perfumed second hand smoke? — Julie Halpern

If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line power becomes useless. — Robert Farrar Capon

To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time. — Cornelia Otis Skinner

THE SENTIMENTALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD has produced a great many paradoxes. The most curious, however, may be that children have acquired more and more stuff the more useless they have become. Until the late nineteenth century, when kids were still making vital contributions to the family economy, they didn't have toys as we know them. They played with found and household objects (sticks, pots, brooms). In his book Children at Play, the scholar Howard Chudacoff writes, Some historians even maintain that before the modern era, the most common form of children's play occurred not with toys but with other children - siblings, cousins, and peers. — Jennifer Senior

When he had finished placing the objects that would be a part of the portrait, the artist asked his subject, "Why do you wish to include the top, milord?" He paused. "I ask this so that I may better understand its place in the portrait." "Because, when it is set in motion, it stands by its own rules. Then it is not an inert thing, like a tree, or a rock." Westcott had smiled. "Ah! But your hand must set it in motion, milord. So it cannot be as independent as you say." "It is the symbol of a soul, Mr. Westcott. Or of a mind. Every man has one, and it is like a top, fashioned by himself. He must keep it upright, by his own hand. He must exert the effort. Otherwise it will topple, and lay inert and useless within himself, not a living thing at all. Or another hand may set it in motion, and then he will have no say in its motion or course." Hugh paused. "This top has sentimental value to me, sir, and I wish to remember it. — Edward Cline

One principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multitude of objects and pursuits. — Nathanael Emmons

Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else
that's how you'll get ahead. — Austin Kleon

Sometimes you have to decide which will hurt more: biting your tongue or having your say. — Faydra D. Fields

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness. — Chuck Palahniuk

Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from that of the Occident, where we see objects arrayed symmetrically on mantelpieces and elsewhere. In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. — Okakura Kakuzo

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. — George Orwell

He walked around all the useless things in the courtyard and touched them with his hands; for some reason, he wished that these would remember him, and love him. But he didn't believe they would. From childhood memories he knew how strange and sad it is after a long absence to see a familiar place again, for these unmoving objects have no memory and do not recognize the stirrings of a stranger's heart. — Andrei Platonov

From Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story, re: the travel book boom of the 1970s
Surprisingly, none of the new developments in travel publishing came from established companies. The changes in the air seemed to completely bypass them and when they did wake up to the upsurge in growth it was too late -- they'd been overtaken. Much the same happened a decade later with computer books. Just as the travel book explosion was led by travelers who got into publishing rather than publishers getting into travel, so the computer book explosion was led by computer geeks getting into publishing. The regular publishers never saw it coming. — Tony Wheeler

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

O Me! O life! ... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless - of cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light - of the objects mean - of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of all - of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest - with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here - that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. — Walt Whitman

A constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects. — Marcel Proust

Useless and precious objects. Taking up space. Taking up time. — Maira Kalman

Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They're too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they're too pissed to get seriously involved in anything. — Andrew Miller

It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about. Your thoughts grow still, useless. Everything must be rebuilt. In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories. You live a little like a child, or an animal. Objects and events may bring things to mind, but in the end they remain no more than what they are in fact. They begin only when you experience them, vanish when others follow. — Andrzej Stasiuk

Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, "Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?" would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified - when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. — George Orwell

I feel like most of the objects coming through the ports are pretty useless. It sort of speaks to this larger point of how much we're actually taking in versus how much we really need. — Mary Mattingly

I got my hands under the breasts, lifted them. Tons of meat. Meat without mouth or eye. MEAT MEAT MEAT. i slammed it into my mouth and flew into heaven. — Charles Bukowski

If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic
to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them. — C.S. Lewis

I own a well-used library card and not much else, though it is true I live in a grand house full of expensive, useless objects. — E. Lockhart

Hang onto that goal and you do what you have to do to make it happen. — Cat Zingano

Useless, it was useless to get in since I don't want to go anywhere.

Bluish objects pass the windows. In jerks all stiff, and brittle; people, walls; a house offers me its black heart through open windows; and the windows pale, all that is black becomes blue, blue this great yellow brick house advancing uncertainly, trembling, suddenly stopping and taking a nose dive. — Jean-Paul Sartre

My own perception of that is somewhat colored by where people ask my advice, which is still, of course, about changes to Python internals or at least standard libraries. — Guido Van Rossum

There's no way of knowing in advance what will get into your work. One collects all the shiny objects that catch the fancy - a great array of them. Some of them you think are utterly useless. I have a large collection of curios of that kind, and every once in a while I need one of them. — Margaret Atwood

Tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. — Maureen Johnson