More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.

But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.

It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped, and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.

Do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

It is no use trying to sum people up.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

Roses, she thought sardonically, All trash, m'dear.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.