Quotes About Futility

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

Opasno je naginjati se nad tu?om prazninom, a u pustoj želji da se u njoj, kao na dnu bunara, ogleda svoje sopstveno lice; jer i to je taština. Taština nad taštinama.

The man who found in his heart this heretical and dangerous thought, which speaks of the futility of one's own being-in-time, finds himself, however, faced with another (final) dilemma: whether to accept the transitoriness of this being-in-time for the sake of that precious and expensively acquired knowledge (which excludes any morality and therefore is made in absolute freedom), or, for the sake of that same knowledge, to yield oneself to the embrace of nothingness.

As well try to organize a herd of crocodiles to pick strawberries.

To try to capture "all the words of a language" is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river.

No, I cannot believe in nothingness being the destined end of all: that would be too futile a climax to content a dramatist clever enough to have invented Jurgen.

You can spit until you're dry, but you'll never make a lake

We're just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have and we just weren't the kind that could have it. [I]t's a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That's what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords.

Nil sub sole novum [...] Qualsiasi azione, nella pienezza del tempo, sprofonda nel nulla.

Era melhor nunca ter nascido — nunca ter desejado nada, nunca ter esperado nada.

You don't understand,' she said. In her lap, the loose hands had ground together: between the fair brows a single line showed, of anger and disgust and a kind of futile perplexity. 'You don't understand: how can you? You were born into a household, with parents and wealth; you knew your friends and your enemies; you knew your position in life; whom you were fighting for: whom you were against. I am alone. Every man is my enemy.

That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.

I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

tolerance is] the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.

NO ADMITTANCE. NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE. GO AWAY.

Even supposing this was the home of some ancient civilization now gone to dust, even supposing a number of exceedingly unlikely things, there was no way that vast treasures of wealth were going to be stored there in any form that would still have meaning now. He shrugged. "I think it's just a dead planet," he said.

Tried to die, though, but can't. You can't die when you never really lived, can you? It would be redundant.

Resistance would be futile, and futility itself was, of course, to be resisted.

Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

I used to tweet, but it's an act of futility. You're not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, 'Oh my God!' because you've opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers.

When you really can't affect something, you almost don't wanna wish too hard, because it's just frustrating.

Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore... prove ultimately futile.