Revenge is profitable. [ Gibbon ]

Whatever is beautiful is also profitable. [ Willmott ]

A shrew profitable, may serve a man reasonable. [ Proverb ]

Bad examples may be as profitable to virtue as good ones. [ Montaigne ]

No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read. [ Seneca ]

Much more profitable and gracious is doctrine by example than by rule. [ Spenser ]

Resolved: Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way. [ JONATHAN EDWARDS ]

To know how to be silent is more difficult, and more profitable, than to know how to speak. [ Fee ]

Biography is the most universally pleasant, the most universally profitable, of all reading. [ Carlyle ]

The casting away things profitable for the maintenance of man's life is an unthankful abuse of the fruits of God's good providence towards mankind. [ Hooker ]

Great, ever fruitful; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. [ Carlyle ]

Some read books only with a view to find fault, while others read only, to be taught; the former are like venomous spiders, extracting a poisonous quality, where the latter, like the bees, sip out a sweet and profitable juice. [ L'Estrange ]

Ideas are, like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down, so to speak, to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings the way is never ending, and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable. [ Bovee ]

Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. [ John Ruskin ]