It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
Interpretation
Knowing irrelevant information is preferable to being entirely uninformed.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes the value of knowledge, even if it seems trivial or useless. It suggests that having information, regardless of its practicality, enriches our lives and contributes to our understanding of the world, whereas ignorance leaves us in a state of limitation and missed opportunities for growth.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of education, one might quote this to emphasize that all knowledge has value.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.
You must know for which harbor you are headed, if you are to catch the right wind to take you there.
The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
Spare yourselves from the indulgence of self-pity. It is always self-defeating. Subdue the negative and emphasize the positive.
Good temper, like a sunny day, sheds a ray of brightness over everything; it is the sweetener of toil and the soother of disquietude!
Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.
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