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

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
Samuel Johnson

Leisure is the time for doing something useful. This leisure the diligent person will obtain the lazy one never.
Benjamin Franklin

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.
Albert J. Nock

Material goods consist of useful material things, and of all rights to hold, or use, or derive benefits from material things, or to receive them at a future time.
Alfred Marshall

Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.
William Cowper

Men value things in three ways: as useful, as pleasant or sources of pleasure, and as excellent, or as intrinsically admirable or honorable.
Mortimer Adler

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in "Old Maid"; the player who is finally left with it has lost.
Evelyn Waugh

Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.
Louisa May Alcott

Most consequential choices involve shades of gray, and some fog is often useful in getting things done.
Timothy Geithner

My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work.
Lloyd Alexander

My problem is how to find the best way of being useful.
Jacques Delors

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else.
Tom Holt

News is important information that may influence your investments. Noise is talk or buzz or some headline that prevents you from seeing a story clearly. News is useful. Noise is a distraction. Calling what's noise and news after the fact is easy.
Maria Bartiromo

Not all lucid dreams are useful but they all have a sense of wonder about them. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?
Stephen LaBerge

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Cory Doctorow

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
Oscar Wilde

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.
Edward Bond

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
David Viscott

Of course voting is useful. But then again, I don't put a big glow to it. Voting is about as essential as washing yourself. It's something you're supposed to do. Now, you can't go around bragging, expecting to get props because you voted. That's stupid.
Chuck D.