Quotes About Value

In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul. Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man's inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness that can light the way in dark times.

People didn't love all of this when they still had it. If you love something, you do what's best for it. You don't destroy it.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

The bitterness of Poor Quality remains long after the sweetness of Low Price is Forgotten. From Hemingway Adventure by Michael Palin.

Sartre puts it, value arises simply from our choices. What we choose, we value simply because we have chosen it (and apparently we remain scot-free at any moment to nonvalue it by simply un-choosing it). In other words, we do not choose (in his view) because we see the value of something. We see the value of something because we have chosen it.

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called this grace wholly gratuitous? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: "the greater fool theory." Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world.

one of the first American "employers" to seize on the practical value of caffeine was the Union Army during the Civil War. The army issued each soldier thirty-six pounds of coffee a year at the same time the economic blockade of the South deprived the Confederacy of coffee.

Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place.

Shame seems to be the going price of achievement, particularly the achievement of knowledge or beauty.

The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce- doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have budget or packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

Each of the tastes has been selected by evolution for its survival value. Either it guides us toward nutrients we need to survive, or it steers us away from ingesting things that might endanger us.

There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

I was not able to understand how it could be right to pay an actor, or a singer, or an instrumentalist for entertaining the public and wrong to pay a ball player for doing exactly the same thing.

Every single minute matters, every single child matters, every single childhood matters.

The entire federal budget for landslide research is $3.5 million a year - far less than the property value lost on a single day when 17 mansions slid down a hill in 2005 in Laguna Beach, Calif.

It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.

That's when it hit me. The site is more important than me.

It's so hard getting rid of something that means something to you, as many of the pieces on our site do for me.

I'm not being arrogant or blase, but I got a bigger buzz sitting opposite Jean-Bernard Delmas over lunch at Chateau Haut-Brion than I did from interviewing Elton John, Liza Minelli or Whitney Houston.

I've always found that no matter how much you spend on a movie - you can spend sixty dollars or sixty million dollars - if the movie's good, it's good.

Size doesn't mean anything - not all the time.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.