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.
Who can calculate the wounds inflicted, their depth and pain, by harsh and mean words spoken in anger? How pitiful a sight is a man who is strong in many ways but who loses all control of himself when some little thing, usually of no significant consequence, disturbs his equanimity.
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
It can be dangerous to weaken the strong in our attempts to strengthen the weak.
To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.
Everyday is a new life to a wise man.
You never get over losses. I've never gotten over one loss I've had in my career. They always stick with me.
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