Adversity, sage useful guest,
Severe instructor, but the best.
It is from thee alone we know
Justly to value things below. [ Somerville ]

The most useful is the greatest. [ Theodore Parker ]

A useful trade is a mine of gold. [ Proverb ]

There is a defeat that is useful. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Nothing is more useful than silence. [ Menander ]

Agreeable advice is rarely useful advice. [ Massillon ]

Praise a fool and you may make him useful. [ Danish Proverb ]

Unless what we do is useful, our glory is vain. [ Phaedrus ]

Stillness accompanied with sound so soft,
Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart
May give an useful lesson to the head,
And learning wiser grow without his books. [ Cowper ]

Censure is often useful, praise often deceitful. [ Churchill ]

He first that useful secret did explain,
That pricking corns foretold the gathering rain. [ Gay ]

If you want to be missed by your friends, be useful. [ Robert E. Lee ]

Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure
Which is useful to them to praise which deceives them. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

He must mingle with the world that desires to be useful. [ Johnson ]

No belief which is contrary to truth can be really useful. [ J. S. Mill ]

Knowledge of our duties is the most useful part of philosophy. [ Whately ]

Money is too inconsiderable to love, yet too useful to throw away. [ Proverb ]

It is not knowing much, but what is useful, that makes a wise, man. [ Proverb ]

Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us. [ Dr. Johnson ]

The first condition of education is being put to wholesome and useful work. [ John Ruskin ]

He that knows useful things, not he that knows many things, is the wise man. [ Proverb ]

We give our best affections to the beautiful, only our second-best to the useful. [ C. N. Bovee ]

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers. [ Amiel ]

Natural selection is the principle by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved. [ Darwin ]

Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all. [ Johnsoniana ]

Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Few people are wise enough to prefer censure which may be useful, to flattery which may betray them. [ La Roche ]

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess. [ Bovee ]

Persevering mediocrity is much more respectable, and unspeakably more useful, than talented inconstancy. [ Dr. James Hamilton ]

Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain; the lazy man never. [ Ben. Franklin ]

It is from the level of calamities, not that of every-day life, that we learn impressive and useful lessons. [ Thackeray ]

What is more useful than fire? Yet if any one prepares to burn a house, it is with fire that he arms his daring hands. [ Ovid ]

The nature of our constitution makes eloquence more useful and more necessary in this country than in any other in Europe. [ Chesterfield ]

Of all the gifts that Nature can give us, the faculty of remaining silent, or of answering a propos, is perhaps the most useful. [ Mme. Campan ]

On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, that of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. [ T. B. Macaulay ]

A friendship that makes the least noise is very often the most useful; for which reason I should prefer a prudent friend to a zealous one. [ Addison ]

In destroying the predisposition to anger, science of all kinds is useful; but the mathematics possess the property in the most eminent degree. [ Dr. Rush ]

To know what is useful and what useless, and to be skilful to provide the one and wise to scorn the other, is the first need for all industrious men. [ John Ruskin ]

The tongue is, at the same time, the best part of man and his worst; with good government, none is more useful, and without it, none is more mischievous. [ Anacharsis ]

The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in few words. [ Johnson ]

What I object to Scotch philosophers in general is that they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth without caring if it be useful truth. [ Sydney Smith ]

The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father, the former has intellect; the latter, genius, which itself is a kind of luxury. [ Schopenhauer ]

Books, to judicious compilers, are useful, - to particular arts and professions absolutely necessary, - to men of real science they are tools; but more are tools to them. [ Johnson ]

The useful encourages itself; for the multitude produce it, and no one can dispense with it: the beautiful must be encouraged; for few can set it forth, and many need it. [ Goethe ]

We protract the career of time by employment, we lengthen the duration of our lives by wise thoughts and useful actions. Life to him who wishes not to have lived in vain is thought and action. [ Zimmermann ]

Socrates, who is by all accounts the undoubted head of the sect of the hen-pecked, owed, and acknowledged that he owed a great part of his virtue to the exercise his useful wife constantly gave him. [ Steele ]

If refined sense, and exalted sense, be not so useful as commonsense, their rarity, their novelty, and the nobleness of their objects, make some compensation, and render them the admiration of mankind. [ Hume ]

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with the comment of the various deaths of men; and it could not but be useful, for who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. [ Montaigne ]

Fine sense and exalted sense are not half as useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense. And he that will carry nothing about him but gold will be every day at a loss for readier change. [ Pope ]

The awakening of our best sympathies, the cultivation of our best and purest tastes, strengthening the desire to be useful and good, and directing youthful ambition to unselfish ends, - such are the objects of true education. [ J. T. Headley ]

An honest reputation is within the reach of all men; they obtain it by social virtues, and by doing their duty. This kind of reputation, it is true, is neither brilliant nor startling, but it is often the most useful for happiness. [ Duclos ]

Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes hacking one another's flesh, converting precious living bodies and priceless living souls into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip manure. [ Carlyle ]

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself. [ Buffon ]

Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels, - teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and the world's good. [ Samuel Smiles ]

No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath. [ Swift ]

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth. [ Landor ]

We meet with few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between, these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. [ La Bruyere ]

Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged. [ Colton ]

Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould, about the roots of their vines, procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light. [ Bacon ]

Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaut on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, Think again, bat man. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose. [ Balzac ]

Business in a certain sort of men is a mark of understanding, and they are honored for it. Their souls seek repose in agitation, as children do by being rocked in a cradle. They may pronounce themselves as serviceable to their friends as troublesome to themselves. No one distributes his money to others, but every one therein distributes his time and his life. There is nothing of which we are so prodigal as of those two things, of which to be thrifty would be both commendable and useful. [ Montaigne ]

No woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. They represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the colored. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try to look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try to talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That has all gone out now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]