“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else.”
- Source
- Our Mutual Friend
- Date
- 1865
Meaning of “No one is useless in this world who…”
Usefulness is defined through reducing another person’s burden, making service a direct measure of value.
Where does it come from?
Our Mutual Friend, Book III, Chapter IX (“Somebody Becomes the Subject of a Prediction”), verified against Project Gutenberg #883 and the stable Wikisource chapter transcription. John Rokesmith (the Secretary) answers Bella Wilfer after she calls herself “useless enough in this world.” This older catalog row modernizes Dickens’s represented wording “who lightens the burden of it for any one else” to “who lightens the burden of it to anyone else”; the frozen quotation remains unchanged and is explicitly treated as a wording variant of the same passage. This is fictional character dialogue about practical usefulness, not an empirical or clinical definition of human worth.
