Top 100 Quotes About Usefulness
#2. Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.
Vera Brittain
#3. To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Theodore Roosevelt
#4. In thy discourse, if thou desire to please;
All such is courteous, useful, new, or wittie:
Usefulness comes by labour, wit byease;
Courtesie grows in court; news in the citie.
George Herbert
#5. As you have learnt something of time, value and make a proper use of it. Once past, it knows no return; how necessary, then, that you spend it in improving your mind and fitting it for future happiness and usefulness.
Dorothea Dix
#6. [Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories
entering into their feelings, validating their experiences
is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
William Deresiewicz
#7. Almost every one of the great religions of the world has made special provisions for them, and the woman who has preferred a celibate to a domestic life has been able to occupy a position of honor and usefulness.
Mary Livermore
#8. Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.
Ellen Willis
#9. The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#10. The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of thestorm, if we can only be the means of making a break in that wall of public opinion which lies right in the way of woman's rights, true dignity, honor and usefulness.
Angelina Grimke
#11. A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.
Peter Drucker
#12. One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world.
Ann Radcliffe
#13. When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.
Marie Curie
#14. Such nonsense!" declared Dr Greysteel. "Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!"
"Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. "That has a sort of moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections.
Susanna Clarke
#15. A happy marriage is a new beginning of life, a new starting point for happiness and usefulness.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
#16. Always help people increase their own self-esteem. Develop your skill in making other people feel important. There is hardly a higher compliment you can pay an individual than helping him to be useful and to find satisfaction in his usefulness.
Donald Laird
#17. Indeed, I am sometimes inclined to doubt whether some men consider youth as rational and intelligent beings, with minds capable of expansion, and talents formed for usefulness.
Joseph Lancaster
#18. The hardness of a diamond is part of its usefulness, but its true value is in the light that shines through it.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#19. The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
John Cheever
#20. Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
F. Sionil Jose
#21. Ways have to be found to maintain university research untramelled by requirements of forecasting application or usefulness.
John Vane
#22. The purpose of minimalist living is to get us to a point where every single thing we have in our homes is something that brings us ongoing joy or provides usefulness regularly.
Genevieve Parker Hill
#23. For me, it's not about price. It's about necessity, quality, and usefulness. Like, I have my Wet N Wild 666 lip liner. It's 99 cents and always has been. I started using it when I was in high school, and it's great.
Fergie
#24. If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
Samuel Johnson
#25. Why is it that when people have no capacity for private usefulness they should be so anxious to serve the public?
Sara Jeannette Duncan
#26. The usefulness of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.
Lane Kirkland
#27. The validity of usefulness, adequacy of popular standards can be tested only by research that violates them.
Paul Feyerabend
#28. Stick to the old truths and the old paths, and learn their di- vineness by sick-beds and in every-day work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion or practical usefulness.
Charles Kingsley
#29. Leaders of men are later remembered less for the usefulness of what they have achieved than for the sweep of their endeavors.
Charles De Gaulle
#30. If all human lives depended upon their usefulness - as might be judged by certain standards - there would be a sudden and terrific mortality in the world.
Gene Tunney
#31. The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
#32. The usefulness of a man or woman of God relies on the ability to remain distinct.
Kevin Thoman
#33. Twitter's popularity and usefulness are mysteries to me.
David Harsanyi
#34. Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo ...
Clifford D. Simak
#35. ... Any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness!
Charles Dickens
#36. New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
John Updike
#37. The loadstar of a saint is God Himself, not estimated usefulness. It is the work that God does through us that count, not what we do for him.
Oswald Chambers
#38. I don't have to justify its awesomeness/activeness/healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is MINE. Not yours.
Lindy West
#39. Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)
Grace Paley
#40. The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen.
David L. Sills
#41. The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and ... there is no rational explanation for it. - Eugene Wigner, 1960
Max Tegmark
#42. But a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him with constant employment within.
Jane Austen
#43. Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.
Walter Savage Landor
#44. People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.
Ray Dalio
#45. I am reassured to know that the straightness of my grain is not a precondition of usefulness to God. And I am humbled to see that out of the twistedness of my wounds, he designs for me a special place of service.
Robert D. Lupton
#46. Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
Josh Billings
#47. A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.
Richard M. Nixon
#48. Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts".
Dean Koontz
#49. There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if 'productivity' and/or 'usefulness' are the measures of human value, and - particularly for artists - this is deeply problematic. We shouldn't given in.
Tasha Golden
#50. The usefulness of the cup is its emptiness.
Bruce Lee
#51. The usefulness of the models in constructing a testable theory of the process is severely limited by the quickly increasing number of parameters which must be estimated in order to compare the predictions of the models with empirical results.
Anatol Rapoport
#52. A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.
William Graham Sumner
#53. We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for being thin ... one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in our children, is a sense of 'usefulness', in other words, are we useful, are we making other peoples' lives a little bit better?
Barack Obama
#54. We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
Thomas Merton
#55. The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
William James
#56. The press briefing today I believe has lost much of its usefulness.
Marlin Fitzwater
#57. When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.
Lee Smolin
#58. What's their purpose?" I asked as a I stood.
"Children? No idea. It appears to be simply an inconvenient stage between birth and usefulness.
Kelley Armstrong
#59. The Character which a youth acquires in the early part of his Life is of great importance towards his future prosperity-one false step may prove irretrievable to his future usefulness.
Abigail Adams
#60. How dark it is before the dawn! In reality that was the beginning of my last debauch. I was soon to be catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence. I was to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes.
Bill W.
#62. I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
Grace Paley
#63. Simply because I have lost faith in the cause doesn't mean the training has lost all of its usefulness.
Susan Dennard
#64. In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness.
Henri Nouwen
#65. And if once a girl's heart is moved to pity, it's more dangerous than anything. She is bound to want to 'save him,' to bring him to his senses, and lift him up and draw him to nobler aims, and restore him to new life and usefulness - well, we all know how far such dreams can go.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#66. The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness.
Jerome K. Jerome
#67. The past is an educational toy for the present. It should be discarded the moment its usefulness is outgrown.
Tom Morrison
#68. The WTO has outlived its usefulness as a setting for trade negotiations. It can still be a good place to resolve disputes (though this can take years) and share ideas, but most countries would be better off choosing their own trading partners and lowering trade barriers at their own pace.
Daniel Altman
#69. The central thing about the kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public usefulness to men.
Oswald Chambers
#70. The central point of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship with Him, not public usefulness to others.
Oswald Chambers
#71. You can tell a lot about an area from its library, and I'd never discount the usefulness of town archives.
Hester Young
#72. The object of all education should be to increase the usefulness of man - usefulness to himself and others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#73. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Dieter Rams
#74. 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
#75. [Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.
Evan Esar
#76. There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.
Amanda Craig
#77. The most we can get out of life is its discipline for ourselves, and its usefulness for others.
Tryon Edwards
#78. Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty.
Joseph Joubert
#79. Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#80. It is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.
Scott Adams
#81. Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet.
Theophile Gautier
#82. It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth.
Cleveland Abbe
#83. The ease with which barley may be substituted directly for wheat in human food and its usefulness to replace wheat milling by-products as feed in the production of the milk supply render its abundant production important.
David F. Houston
#84. Usefulness! It is not a fascinating word, and the quality is not one of which the aspiring spirit can dream o' nights, yet on the stage it is the first thing to aim at.
Ellen Terry
#85. Any idol, regardless of its beauty or usefulness or original purpose, is to be set aside so that Christ might reign supreme, without a single competitor.
Charles R. Swindoll
#86. It will take away a man's usefulness in his generation.
John Owen
#87. All people by nature desire to know. An example of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves.
Aristotle.
#89. In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them
Eric Hoffer
#90. In the perfect society, there is neither emotion nor mercy; precious space cannot be wasted on those who have outlived their usefulness.
Frank Herbert
#91. What will break me into a million pieces so that I am beyond repair, beyond usefulness?
Suzanne Collins
#92. The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on a count of years but on your will.
Michel De Montaigne
#93. Your success and usefulness in the world is going to be measured by your confession and by the tenacity with which you "hold fast" that confession under all circumstances.
F. F. Bosworth
#94. The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
#95. Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.
Charles William Eliot
#96. several of us were corrected by our fathers; and though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.
Benjamin Franklin
#97. The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities. It should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness; and, while it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance
Amelia Bloomer
#98. Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.
Stephen Fry
#99. Nothing in this world is so good as usefulness. It binds your fellow-creatures to you, and you to them; it tends to the improvement of your own character; and it gives you a real importance in society, much beyond what any artificial station can bestow.
Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
#100. It was not very long before he discovered; but that belongs to the next chapter and the beginning of another adventure in which the hobbit again showed his usefulness.
J.R.R. Tolkien
