To be useful to others and to be useful to myself is definitely a better place to be.
Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honorable is better. On such principles children and persons of every age which requires education should be trained.
I think the core problem is much closer to recognizing where force is of value, where it is useful, and to distinguish that from situations in which war is not useful or is indeed counterproductive.
Nothing is so engaging as the little domestic cares into which you appear to be entering, and as to reading it is useful for onlyfilling up the chinks of more useful and healthy occupations.
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.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
If the government can manage to collect and release personal information in a secure and useful way, so can private companies, which will empower consumers to become better shoppers.
Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.
Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.
A duty is to be chosen from what is virtuous, and from what is useful, and also from the comparison of the two, one with the other; but nothing is recognized by Christians as virtuous or useful which is not helpful to the future life.
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.
Some people, they take their form of working out as a religion that they think is better than everyone else's. I'm not like that. If you have a better way to work out, and you can teach it to me, and I find it to be useful and gets me in better shape, I'm all about.
Lord, you are God! You made us. Who better to know how to fix us when we've gone wrong? who better to set us to rights again? Who better to love us through the fire and refine us into something beautiful and useful despite our wrongs?
We recognize in a plant some unknown power, a single, form-giving force, which creates and conserves, which moves unwaveringly toward its end, which appropriates what is useful to it and rejects that which would harm it.
Which is better -- to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better -- to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?