#utility

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three - and paradise is when you have none. ↗

— Doug Larson

#none #opulence #paradise #telephone #three

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. ↗

— Karl Marx

#nothing #object #utility #value #without

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web. ↗

— Edwin Way Teale

#between #difference #plus #spider #telephone

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible. ↗

— Elliot Richardson

#bureaucratic #cruel #failure #futility #game

Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. ↗

— Friedrich Schiller

#allegiance #great #idol #must #powers

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#life

The wise hero must realise how terrible it will be, when all the wealth of this world lies waste, as now in various places throughout this middle-earth walls stand, blown by the wind covered with frost, the buildings storm-swept. The halls decay, their lords lie deprived of joy, the whole hearth-troop has fallen, proud by the wall. from THE WANDERER, lines 73-80 ↗

— Anonymous

#beautiful-writing #destruction #futility #haunting #middle-earth

Facebook is such a basic utility. It's something that is such a part of peoples' lives, I think it's hard to imagine it going away. ↗

— Sean Parker

#basic #facebook #going #going away #hard

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#life #numb #numbness #past-future #resignation

Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else. ↗

— Derek Landy

#feelings #futility #language #psychiatry #psychoanalysis