#usefulness

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

#creation #excellence #god #nature #respect

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

— William Golding

#communication #usefulness #art

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

#doing #imagination #left #men #obsessed

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

#decline #dissolution #drunkard #fitness #gutter

A person's worth is quite independent of their usefulness to society. ↗

— Kjell Magne Bondevik

#person #quite #society #their #usefulness

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness. ↗

— John Cheever

#discover #life #make #need #sense

The reason why I take my life is because I want to go to my wife and boy. My usefulness in this world is at an end. I can not be satisfied in any business and can not be without their companionship. ↗

— Alex Campbell

#because #boy #business #companionship #end

Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend. ↗

— Walter Savage Landor

#bend #direction #like #lose #men

My trophy value exceeded my military usefulness. ↗

— Lord Mountbatten

#military #trophy #usefulness #value

The vulgar crowd values friends according to their usefulness. ↗

— Ovid

#crowd #friends #their #usefulness #values