These usefulness quotes will inspire you. Usefulness is the quality of having utility and especially practical worth or applicability or the quality or fact of being useful.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging usefulness quotes, usefulness sayings, and usefulness proverbs.
Best Usefulness Quotes
- “Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.” ~ Peace Pilgrim
- “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.” ~ Bruce Lee
- “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 and developed.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “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
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“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Always help people increase their own self-esteem. Develop your skill in making other people feel important. There is hardly a higher compliment you can pay an individual than helping him to be useful and to find satisfaction in his usefulness.” ~ Donald Laird
- “Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
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“The usefulness of the cup is its emptiness.” ~ Bruce Lee
- “It is a great misfortune to be of use to nobody; scarcely less to be of use to everybody.” ~ Baltasar Gracian
- “As with all children, the feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Success can corrupt; usefulness can only exalt.” ~ Dimitris Mitropoulos
- “What is a good man?
Simply one whose life is useful to the world.
And a bad man is simply one whose life is harmful to others.
There are, however, those who are harmful and yet enjoy a good reputation, and who manage to profit by a show of usefulness.
These are the worst of all.” ~ Zhang Zhao -
“The object of all education should be to increase the usefulness of man – usefulness to himself and others.” ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
- “We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a ‘common goal’ of nature as I can guess at.” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.” ~ Immanuel Kant
- “Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.” ~ Charles William Eliot
- “Nothing in this world is so good as usefulness. It binds your fellow-creatures to you, and you to them; it tends to the improvement of your own character; and it gives you a real importance in society, much beyond what any artificial station can bestow.” ~ Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
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“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.” ~ Josh Billings
- “Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.” ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
- “I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “The vulgar crowd values friends according to their usefulness.” ~ Ovid
- “It is my humble prayer that I may be of some use in my day and generation.” ~ Hosea Ballou
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“It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth.” ~ Cleveland Abbe
- “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.” ~ Eric Temple Bell
- “A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.” ~ Richard M. Nixon
- “Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “By friendship you mean the greatest love, the greatest usefulness, the most open communication, the noblest sufferings, the severest truth, the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds which brave men and women are capable.” ~ Jeremy Taylor
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“Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.” ~ Walter Savage Landor
- “Thousands of men breathe, move, and live; pass off the stage of life and are heard of no more. Why? They did not a particle of good in the world; and none were blest by them, none could point to them as the instrument of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spoke, could be recalled, and so they perished–their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than the insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something.” ~ Thomas Chalmers
- “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 , Usefulness quotes at work
- “Not many appreciate the ultimate power and potential usefulness of basic knowledge accumulated by obscure, unseen investigators who, in a lifetime of intensive study, may never see any practical use for their findings but who go on seeking answers to the unknown without thought of financial or practical gain.” ~ Eugenie Clark
- “Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” ~ Alfred Korzybski
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“I am aware of the usefulness of science to society and of the benefits society derives from it.” ~ Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
- “The ease with which barley may be substituted directly for wheat in human food and its usefulness to replace wheat milling by-products as feed in the production of the milk supply render its abundant production important.” ~ David F. Houston
- “Experiments were not attempted at that time, we did not believe in the usefulness of the concept anyway, and I finished my thesis in 1962 with a feeling like an artist balancing on a high rope without any interested spectators.” ~ Richard Ernst
- “Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.” ~ William O. Douglas
- “A man’s usefulness depends on his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
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“A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.” ~ Walter Lippmann
- “Every person who has grown to any degree of usefulness, every person who has grown to distinction, almost without exception has been a person who has risen by overcoming obstacles, by removing difficulties, by resolving that when he met discouragement he would not give up.” ~ Booker T. Washington
- “Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.” ~ Dan Inosanto
- “The usefulness of any meeting is inversely proportional to the size of the group.” ~ Lane Kirkland
- “The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness.” ~ Laozi
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“Have I done aught of value to my fellow-men? Then have I done much for myself.” ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater
- “Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.” ~ Laozi - “There are those who believe that the value of a children’s book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. In fact, I happen to think that’s huge.” ~ Barbara Park
- “Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.” ~ Sherry Turkle
- “Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful – to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.” ~ Thorstein Veblen
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“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” ~ George E. P. Box
- “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “Use me, God. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.” ~ Julia Cameron
- “The Lord was pleased to strengthen us, and remove all fear from us, and disposed our hearts to be as useful as possible.” ~ Richard Allen
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“Quality is free. It’s not a gift, but it’s free. The ‘unquality’ things are what cost money.” ~ Phil Crosby
- “Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it” ~ Richard P. Feynman
- “We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for being thin… one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in our children, is a sense of ‘usefulness’, in other words, are we useful, are we making other peoples’ lives a little bit better?” ~ Barack Obama
- “A person’s worth is quite independent of their usefulness to society.” ~ Kjell Magne Bondevik
- “The most we can get out of life is its discipline for ourselves, and its usefulness for others.” ~ Tryon Edwards
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“Usefulness depends on tractability.” ~ Kenneth Arrow
- “Much of the usefulness of any career must lie in the impress that it makes upon, and the lessons that it teaches to, the generations that come after.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.” ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder
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“A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.” ~ Peter Drucker
- “With a basic understanding of all humans as brothers and sisters, we can appreciate the usefulness of different systems and ideologies that can accommodate different individuals and groups with different cultural heritages, having different dispositions and tastes. Each person has the right to choose whatever is most suitable, on the basis of a deep understanding of all others as brothers and sisters.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal ‘objectivity,’ as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its ‘elegance,’ or its congruity with our residual beliefs” ~ William James
