Usefulness Quotes

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so, we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.

~ Seneca

If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.

~ Criss Jami

One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.

~ Criss Jami

Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

~ Wendell Berry

Being divorced does not necessarily make one’s advice on marriage useless … or useful.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

~ Brian Selznick

Knowledge is something which you can use.Belief is something which uses you.

~ Idries Shah

People who understand how to convert their time into useful products do not complain of boredom. They have too many important tasks to accomplish that they can hardly get bored.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Be always employed to something useful.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought”, “a priori givens”, etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.

~ Albert Einstein

There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between, say, Caesar's Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

Today is sacred - for it will never come again. What could be more important than living this day with attention and the intention to be of benefit, to the best of your ability, to all you encounter?

~ John Bruna

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.

~ Ivan Illich

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists.

~ Vineet Raj Kapoor

Sharpen your life always; even though it will come to an end like a pencil, we have to keep on writing

~ Munia Khan

Let our information and social technologies raise awareness and not propaganda, build connections and not passive-aggression.

~ Criss Jami

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.

~ Charles Dickens

A lamp cannot play the role of the Sun and the Sun cannot play the role of a lamp.

~ Amit Kalantri

Don't feel bad if your youth cannot be joyful, but at least make it useful.

~ Amit Kalantri

But the toaster was quite satisfied with itself, thank you. Though it knew from magazines that there were toasters who could toast four slices at a time, it didn't think that the master, who lived alone and seemed to have few friends, would have wanted a toaster of such institutional proportions. With toast, it's quality that matters, not quantity.

~ Thomas M. Disch

Meanings with no purpose are useful for meaningless debates on what the meaner meant. And that's what #politics is all about - misreading.

~ Will Advise

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.

~ Ivan Illich

I have a thing for things that last.

~ Criss Jami

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful.

~ Criss Jami

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

~ Henry David Thoreau

People skills are useless with cats, because cats are immune to training, and do whatever they decide in any situation... And most importantly they aren’t human.

~ Will Advise

Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

. . . for any worthwhile martial arts skill to be pragmatic, it has to be done live, otherwise it is of limited or no use in actual combat

~ Soke Behzad Ahmadi

I was not merely cleaning an oven, I was improving the world.

~ Agnostic Zetetic

It's more useful to have someone fear you than respect you.

~ J. Cornell Michel

I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.

~ William Golding

Love comes into being through useful service to others.

~ Emanuel Swedenborg

I think her favorite thing about our . . . collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

~ N.k. Jemisin

While you are so busy trying to make yourself humble,many are persistently and quietly promoting themselves.

~ Toba Beta

I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.

~ Alice Munro