#utility

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts. ↗

— Laura Riding

#art #creative #indeed #referring #social

The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#life-is-short #courage

There is, in the Army, a little known but very important activity appropriately called Fatigue. Fatigue, in the Army, is the very necessary cleaning and repairing of the aftermath of living. Any man who has ever owned a gun has known Fatigue, when, after fifteen minutes in the woods and perhaps three shots at an elusive squirrel, he has gone home to spend three-quarters of an hour cleaning up his piece so that it will be ready next time he goes to the woods. Any woman who has ever cooked a luscious meal and ladled it out in plates upon the table has known Fatigue, when, after the glorious meal is eaten, she repairs to the kitchen to wash the congealed gravy from the plates and the slick grease from the cooking pots so they will be ready to be used this evening, dirtied, and so washed again. It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue. ↗

— James Jones

#chores #domesticity #fatigue #futility #repetition

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#method #order #utility #imagination

Life ... is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#futility #hopelessness #life #life

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#futility #shakespeare #shakespeare

To remove this obstacle I repeat or refer to such knowledge as has come under my notice, my own previously expressed views, and also describe and exhibit my last experiments and explain their novelty and utility. ↗

— Lawrence Hargrave

#come #describe #exhibit #experiments #explain

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

The only reason of the institution of civil government; and the only rational ground of submission to it, is the common safety and utility. ↗

— Jonathan Mayhew

#civil government #common #government #ground #institution

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin. ↗

— P.D. James

#pessimism #posterity #the-future #men