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
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
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
A happy marriage is a new beginning of life, a new starting point for happiness and usefulness.
Dean Stanley
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
Samuel Johnson
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
Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.
Charles Horton Cooley
The vulgar crowd values friends according to their usefulness
Ovid
It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth
Cleveland Abbe
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime
W. E. B. Du Bois
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...
Theodore Roosevelt
A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user
Theodore Roosevelt