Quotes About Futility

Yachting has long been ruefully likened to standing in a cold shower while tearing up money." 42.

The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available – the language of parables, prose and poetry. This is why the mystics would write so extensively about how nothing can be written and would preach beautiful sermons about the futility of words. Without such well-honed words we may begin to think that we have something to say instead of viewing our life as the space out of which God speaks.

In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is another place where I quibble. If it's all futile, we're excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing. It's soothing to have an excuse for hopelessness. And we do have a cultural bias toward believing that the most cynical response to any situation is the wisest and most knowledgable one.

I have given up trying to be happy. It is no use and leads to nothing.

There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was. This futility had let's call it a flavor.

His words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter -- if not a paragraph or proper noun -- in the history of philosophy.

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Lo disuadieron dos consideraciones: la conciencia de que la tarea era interminable, la conciencia de que era inútil.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.

Naturalmente, esas «loterías» fracasaron. Su virtud moral era nula. No se dirigían a todas las facultades del hombre: únicamente a su esperanza.

Futile: it was an epitaph on his past and an adjective for his tomorrow.

nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it's life itself, can't you see? It's life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you're only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.

From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.

Updike "describes to no purpose.

what did it mean, then, when his story was nothing, just a suggestion of a life?

A lifetime assault of contradictory messages–to be sexy, to respect, that all men were dogs but without them women were nothing–reinforced her sense of powerlessness and futility.

There is something inherently foolish in soldiering on when there is no hope of payoff.

In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy. The day will come when our beloved children (the cuckolds of the future) will be prepared to be cuckolded and will no longer suffer for it, because we shall have inoculated them with commonsense and given them anti-cuckoldry injections. Now

Others have seen the assassination as a useful reminder of the futility of such attempts at direct action. For what did it achieve? If the assassins had really wanted to quash the rise of one-man rule in Rome, if they wanted to kill the tyranny as well as the tyrant, they were strikingly unsuccessful.

you always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line.

Hidup ini Anakku, hidup ini tak ada harganya sama sekali. Tunggulah saatnya, dan kelak engkau akan berpikir, bahwa sia-sia saja Tuhan menciptakan manusia di dunia ini.