Best 111 quotes in «amusing quotes» category

To prove to an indignant questioner on the spur of the moment that the work I do was useful seemed a thankless task and I gave it up. I turned to him with a smile and finished, 'To tell you the truth we don't do it because it is useful but because it's amusing.' The answer was thought of and given in a moment: it came from deep down in my mind, and the results were as admirable from my point of view as unexpected. My audience was clearly on my side. Prolonged and hearty applause greeted my confession. My questioner retired shaking his head over my wickedness and the newspapers next day, with obvious approval, came out with headlines 'Scientist Does It Because It's Amusing!' And if that is not the best reason why a scientist should do his work, I want to know what is. Would it be any good to ask a mother what practical use her baby is? That, as I say, was the first evening I ever spent in the United States and from that moment I felt at home. I realised that all talk about science purely for its practical and wealth-producing results is as idle in this country as in England. Practical results will follow right enough. No real knowledge is sterile. The most useless investigation may prove to have the most startling practical importance: Wireless telegraphy might not yet have come if Clerk Maxwell had been drawn away from his obviously 'useless' equations to do something of more practical importance. Large branches of chemistry would have remained obscure had Willard Gibbs not spent his time at mathematical calculations which only about two men of his generation could understand. With this trust in the ultimate usefulness of all real knowledge a man may proceed to devote himself to a study of first causes without apology, and without hope of immediate return.

Two things.' 'Name them. I am instructing you to name them.' 'I don't think you've been in love. Not recently, anyway. I'm not sure you remember what it's like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword. That's the first thing.' Yeats didn't react. If anything, he seemed baffled. 'The second thing is I wouldn't characterize Harry as indecisive and untrained with weapons.

Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.

What the hell?” Ian asked, holding his hands over the front of his Christmas briefs. Sara had ordered them from the Internet, and he'd worn them to please her. Too bad there hadn't been enough time for the underwear to meet with an unfortunate accident. A lot could be blamed on a washing machine.

As for the fan, she agreed that it was a most amusing trifle: just what she would wish to buy for herself, if it had not been so excessively ugly!

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

An amusing fact: as far as I can recall, when playing the Ruy Lopez I have not yet once in my life had to face the Marshall Attack!

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

You know, Mac,”Cadmus said still looking out the window. “We may have to work on the way we tell our story …apparently it’s not amusing enough.” “I’ll try to include a joke between ‘he bled to death’and ‘the city burned’.”Machaon responded tersely.

[A]n Obama presidency would be an amusing approximation of the Carter administration, complete with vaporous moralizing and foreign policy bungling.

Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs?

At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since.

Certainty without power can be interesting, even amusing. Certainty with power can be dangerous.

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

I enjoyed the courtroom as just another stage but not so amusing as Broadway.

I do not wish to help Jeremy Clarkson be amusing in the event of my death.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

I find it highly amusing that Donald Trump talks about "Make America Great Again." He doesn`t make a thing in America, except bankruptcies.

I found my friends very amusing the first time because they are funny and amusing. They really are because they're people who've got everything. They're sort of like camp caricatures of what you expect an aristocrat should be: vicious, rude, caustic unpleasantries.

If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.

I Google myself to see what come up when you Google Daniel Radcliffe because that's always amusing.

I love funny people, and when I'm with funny people, or people who are amusing in their weirdness, I love it. Because that to me is funny, as opposed to someone who stops and says, 'Hey let me tell you a joke.'

I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.

I'm useless scrabbling around at home. I get on everyone's nerves, including my own. I'm not very good at amusing myself.

I really am a happy, amusing fellow at heart. Trouble is I seem the only one left.

I only went to one Star Trek convention and that was in the late '80s. I hadn't gone to a convention before that. It was quite amusing, with the people dressed up and all of that.

I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing to talk to.

I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

I don't do emoticons unless I'm making a big deal out of them. I'll type out, 'This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.' And then do it.

It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

It is my belief, you cannot deal with the most serious things in the world unless you understand the most amusing.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

It's amused me the writers who have assumed that I was referring to a hateful quality of society in the '80s. I think that degree of hatefulness is pretty much steady throughout human history. To me, it's just an amusing sense of self-deprecation - my hateful years. It was entirely personal; it was my personal, hateful years, when I most overtly tried to lash out at society. As I used to say: it was an attempt to burn society down to the ground.

It's all in your headJ you have the power to make things seem hard or easy or even amusing. The choice is yours.

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it

I would have liked to have known Oscar Wilde because I think he must have been very amusing and entertaining.

It was always amusing to be inside Apple and read what journalists said we were doing

I've been told to speed up my delivery when I perform. But if I lose the stammer, I'm just another slightly amusing accountant.

It's rather amusing at my advanced age to become a sex symbol.

Life's more amusing than we thought.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

Noodles are not only amusing but delicious.

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

Movies are usually difficult, often insane, constantly challenging and always strangely amusing to make.