Quotes About Futility

The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in- + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more.

All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!

Waiting for changing opinions is like waiting for nothing.

Humans, we just hop out of things, off things. We splatter ourselves in inappropriate places. Because we have nothing to live for. Because we want to destroy what we can. Because we want to be something we can't. Because we don't really believe we can die.

Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.

How... how do I die?" "In pain," he said. "Screaming... She said there was an enemy you had to fight. A creature of darkness. She said Skulduggery fought by your side for some of it, but... she sensed things more than she saw them, you know? She felt terror, and death, and futility. She felt the world on the edge of destruction, and she sensed evil. Unimaginable evil.

Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

You cannot make a windmill go with a pair of bellows.

The pointlessness of that, the pressure of that, almost got to me again. The waste of it all.

now in her eyes the knowledge that this was futile, that this had always been futile

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.

The current situation reminds me too much of the fable of the farmer whose chickens are dying. The local priest gives one remedy af- ter another—prayers, potions, oaths—until all of the chickens are dead. "Too bad," says the priest, "I had so many other good ideas.

If wishing could make men die, there'd be nary a live one left.

If wishing could make men die, there'd be nary a live one left." As suddenly

She waves her arms at the world. "It's all just time filler until we die.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

A horribly bitter taste came into his mouth: the futility of everything, the eternal pain of existence.

Ah, vieste não é, Edgar Linton? - disse, com irada excitação.- És uma dessas coisas que sempre encontramos quando menos as queremos, e que quando são desejadas, nunca se encontram!

It doesn't mean a thing. Not a thing. Sometimes, in life, there is no meaning at all.

Sure, nothing succeeds like success. Fact is, dearest, we are fools. We cling to an ideal no one wants or cares about. I am the greater fool of the two of us. I go on eating out my heart and poisoning every moment of my life in the attempt to rouse people's sensibilities. At least if I could do it with closed eyes. The irony is I see the futility of my efforts and yet I can't let go.

Resistance is vain in any case; it only leads to useless struggle while inviting grief and sorrow.

Desiring something that you cannot possess is but a fruitless voyage.

How do you explain the bone-deep knowledge that this thing you con for, lie for, cheat for, ain't never gonna