Practical Utility Quotes

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

I did not say history was bunk. It was bunk to me . . I did not need it very bad.

A king may be a tool, a thing of straw; but if he serves to frighten our enemies, and secure our property, it is well enough; a scarecrow is a thing of straw, but it protects the corn.

Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent.

I'm afraid I don't have a very pragmatic or unromantic view of props. I don't imbue them with any great sense of mystery or anything.

Public authorities should not simply wait until they are asked for information. They should develop policies that take essential information to the people before they ask for it. Such positive actions can be much more cost-effective, and of greater practical utility, than is the case when departments wait passively for the submission of inquiries.

When the most abstract and "useless" disciplines have been cultivated for a time, they are often seized upon as practical tools by other departments of science. I conceive that this is no accident, as if one bought a top hat for a wedding, and discovered later when a fire broke out, that it could be used as a water bucket.

It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.