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Quotes About Futility

Un sentimiento de absurdo, tétrico y grotesco: he aquí la única verdad estúpida que había quedado después de todas sus experiencias. La vida entera parecía no tener más significado que un puñado de arena. Bastaba con abrir los dedos para que no quedara nada.
~ Jerzy Andrzejewski
Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer's hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Como é inútil tudo quanto já foi escrito, feito e pensado, quando não se conseguem evitar estas coisas! Devem ser mentiras e insignificâncias, quando a cultura de milhares de anos não conseguiu impedir que se derramassem esses rios de sangue e que existam aos milhares estas prisões, onde se sofrem tantas dores.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
To hell with it. What was the use trying to make safe and sure our little life? Sooner or later the great wave must come and sweep it all away. "What about a drink with me, Fred?
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Da li znate, bra?o, šta je najjezivije na svetu? - Prazna ?aša - odgovori Lenc. Ferdinand ga zbrisa jednim zamahom: - Gotfride, žalosno je kad je muškarac lakrdijaš. On se opet obrati nama. - Vreme je, drugovi, najjezivije. Vreme! Trenutak u kome živimo, a kojim ipak ne vladamo.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Everyone chats and smiles, chats about nothing, shouts and drinks themselves silly occasionally or all the time. They they die one fine day, old or young, they die, tucked up into the earth. That's what it's like. Swarming lives, with no meaning, no number.
~ Erik Fosnes Hansen
Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
~ Erma Bombeck
Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.
~ Erma Bombeck
He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth.
~ Ernest Becker
You will die like a dog for no good reason.
~ Ernest Hemingway
That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had any time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Ne m'envoie plus ouvrir la porte. Tu as vu que c'était inutile. L'expérience nous apprend que lorsqu'on entend sonner à la porte, c'est qu'il n'y a jamais personne.
~ Eugene Ionesco
Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got—nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.
~ Eugene O'Neill
Nonsense. You aren't alive to begin with," I pointed out. "Suck it up and make the best of it, Milo. The future is bright, I assure you." "We come into existence, and we float through space, doomed, until we all die horribly. No reason to live at all." Milo the busboy wept uncontrollably. He probably knew more than I did, but who can say?
~ Andrew Smith
I can't bear the pointlessness of what we're doing. Because it is pointless. It's one great, enormous pointless pit of pointlessness.
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
Words aren't necessary. They won't change anything.
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
Tu ne signifie rien. Tu n'es qu'une minuscule mite qu'on peut réduire en poussière entre ses doigts mais qui, si on la laisse faire, peut faire un trou dans un tissu précieux. Un grain de poivre insignifiant, mais qui, si on le croque par inadvertance, gâchera le mets le plus raffiné dont on aurait voulu se délecter. Voilà ce que tu es. Rien. Rien du tout.
~ Andrzej Sapkowski
as if the next thing must quickly come along to occupy her, or the abyss might open. What abyss? The abyss that waits for all of us, when all our actions seem futile, when the ability to fill the day seems stalled, and the waiting takes on an edge of dread.
~ Anita Brookner
have been blessed because I have been poor—poor enough to swallow my pride and humbly ask for assistance. The result? Not merely success in reaching my occupational goals, but lasting friendships with those who saved the day for me. So, don't become defensive about your lack by trying to gloss over it or pretending the problem doesn't exist. Chances are that such an attitude will end in futility and you'll
~ Robert H. Schuller
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
~ Robert Heinlein
To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can't be done.
~ Robert J. Sawyer
They had to stir the churn of the ocean, until the soma floated up, as butter floats from milk. And this task could not be undertaken in opposition to the Asuras, but only with their help. The pronouncement ran contrary to everything the Devas had previously thought. But in the end, what did they have to lose, given that their lives were so futile? Now they thought: Anything, so long as there be a trial, a risk, a task.
~ Roberto Calasso
At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground.
~ Robin Neillands
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
~ Roland Barthes