Quotes About Relevance

You have to compete in the same way for your reader's attention. He is not looking for your letter. He has a thousand and one other things more important to him to occupy his mind. Why should he divert his attention from them to plow through pages of type about you or your projects?

When you spend your day doing things you believe are important, your life has meaning. Conversely, when you spend your day doing things that make no sense to you, you feel empty, frustrated and angry.

Homer was thus at once contemporary in content and antique in form." - Bernard Knox

It's fascinating how often theological throwaway comes back to haunt you.

After all, the real question is not whether the Bible is inspired, but whether it is true. If it is true, it does not need to be inspired. If it is true, it makes no difference whether it was written by a man or a god.

The advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don't need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don't have any use for it.

Those who express even a little of themselves never become old-fashioned.

an idea is creative when it is new to people who use or evaluate it, and (at least some of them) believe it could be valuable to themselves or others.

Cornerstone No. 2 is the Theory of Relevance, which states: No matter how interesting or how true something may be, the primary factor to take into consideration is how relevant it is to your achieving main your objective.

In summation, if someone feels the psychological need to hold court, that's his business. Your job is to mind your business. Don't allow yourself to be intimidated by someone else's knowledge—or apparent knowledge. What another person knows or doesn't know will not affect your success one way or another, so from your standpoint it's an irrelevancy

The way I always kind of look at it: everything's important and nothing's important. If you're gonna have a drama, have it over something that's worth the time. Some people take it more seriously than others, like a Lowell. But we all end up the same.

Eventually, computers and robots will run things. Humans will manage those machines, but that doesn't require courage or strength, or any characteristics like those. In fact, men are outliving their usefulness

Here it is important to note that a basic rule in the interpretation of historical evidence is that any piece of evidence depends upon the context from which it is taken.

The great asset of a broad liberal arts education, as I know it, is that it does not have much bearing on any vocation in particular but has great relevance to all vocations in general—provided that the college environment within which it is carried out is accepted as real, as real as any chapter in one's life, and provided that an explicit effort is made to prepare students to serve and be served by the present society, using the college experience as the working laboratory.

fellows are just naturally interested in a good piece of work and have no unnatural restrictions in looking it over. Perhaps, and may the sahibs of the Fogg forgive me for thinking it, this simple, curious outlook of healthy men is more important than some of the monuments themselves.

If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was . . .

If the scene is about what the scene is about, you're in deep shit.

There is no such thing as a portable story. An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.

As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.

Particularly during one's youth, it is difficult to distinguish trivia from what is worthy.

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one—quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.

But that is the way it is with all oracles, Jack. When that which is foreseen comes to pass, the inquirer is no longer the same person he was when he posed the question. It is impossible to make a man understand what he will become with the passage of time; and it is only a future self to whom a prophecy is truly relevant.