#usefulness

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#art #creative #feeling #fitness #generality

The vulgar crowd values friends according to their usefulness. ↗

— Ovid

#crowd #friends #their #usefulness #values

Education is more than Pisa. Particularly musical education. We also need education and training for more than reasons of usefulness and marketability. ↗

— Johannes Rau

#education #marketability #more #musical #need

The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system. ↗

— Kevin Kelly

#arise #become #being #being overwhelmed #enough

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#according #am #degree #destinations #i

[God] is able to take your life, with all of the heartache, all of the pain, all of the regret, all of the missed opportunities, and use you for His glory. ↗

— Charles R. Swindoll

#glory-of-god #god #pain #usefulness #life

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

#contentment #diligence #generosity #service #usefulness

The press briefing today I believe has lost much of its usefulness. ↗

— Marlin Fitzwater

#briefing #i #i believe #lost #much

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

#existentialism #human-dignity #meaning #nihilism #usefulness

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#conceive #convenience #greatest #i #itself