Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)
“There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.”
Letter to A.S. Suvorin (June 16, 1892)
Letters
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Anton Chekhov 222
Russian dramatist, author and physician 1860–1904Related quotes
Lionel Trilling
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“Ignorance has its virtues; without it there’d be mighty little conversation.”
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John Gray
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'Modus Vivendi' (p.34)
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Hans Hofmann
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'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 59
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
“Nothing is more incontestable than the existence of our sensations; …”
Jean le Rond d'Alembert
(1717–1783) French philosopher
in the Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_pr%C3%A9liminaire_de_l%E2%80%99Encyclop%C3%A9die.
Context: Nothing is more incontestable than the existence of our sensations;...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
(1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi
translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 51.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace
Context: The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.
“I know nothing of music; I would not give a farthing for all the music in the universe.”
Jonathan Swift
(1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet
Observations on Lord Orrery's Remarks on Life of Swift, Delany, (1754), p. 192.
Disputed
“It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.”
Satius est supervacua scire quam nihil.
Seneca the Younger
(-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXVIII: On liberal and vocational studies, Line 45.
“It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.”
Tom Stoppard
(1937) British playwright
Misattributed
Source: Seneca, Epistle 88, as seen in the following: "You may sweep all these theories in with the superfluous troops of 'liberal' studies; the one class of men give me a knowledge that will be of no use to me, the other class do away with any hope of attaining knowledge. It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing. One set of philosophers offers no light by which I may direct my gaze toward the truth; the other digs out my very eyes and leaves me blind." Seneca: Epistle 88 http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_2.html#%E2%80%98LXXXVIII1