Quotes About Futility

It is vain to look for a defense against lightning.

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

Among the tragedies of our time is humanity's pursuit of personal peace apart from God's enabling grace. That pursuit takes many forms: material, intellectual, social, even religious; but they all end in futility. When sinners find peace through God's grace, that is beautiful, that is cause for rejoicing! "Grace . . . and peace" is the proper Christian greeting and celebration (v. 2).

Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.

Well, I could take on the Sisyphean task of trying to match these folks in every new game as it comes out, but frankly, repeated failure is a predictable cycle, and rather boring. I have better things to do with my time.

I know it. I know everything.' She waited a moment. 'What do you know?' 'No use making more people. People die.

You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can't. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.

The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless vanity deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion.

You fellows know there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can't. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.

it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavor to attain an enduring solution of the problem.

The callow birdlet waits for two or three, But to the eyes of those already fledged, In vain the net is spread or shaft is shot.

The last day of the war provided chilling closure. The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm. The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it.

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

Oly sok boldogtalanság van a világban, t?nÅ'dött, komoran meghajtva fejét a tragikus gondolat elÅ'tt, és Å' mit sem tehet senki boldogtalansága ellen, legkevésbé a saját boldogtalansága ellen.

Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead

I used to get a big kick out of saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.

And both are gone. And ironically, I'm drawn to repeat my well known apothegm of futility: that, just as the person who wants praise will never be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And I therefore still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die. Fortunately, I've been able to get by very neatly without doing either.

Come le medaglie olimpiche e le coppe di tennis, significavano solo che il loro possessore aveva fatto più brillantemente di chiunque altro qualcosa che non serviva a nessuno.

and a great, choking moan tore from Yossarian's throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain. Colonel

Trying to accumulate wealth by the sweat of your brow and hard labor is one way to become the richest man in the graveyard.

The most hopeless idleness is that most smoothed with excellent plans.

All human philosophy is riddled with the nightmare of searching in vain.