Quotes About Futility

all the education and good intentions in the world couldn't help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

The loudest sound on the earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd.

These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives: for all the scents of green things growing, each breath is but an exhalation of the grave. Bodies jerk like puppet corpses, and hell walks laughing— Laughing

Futility is the defining characteristic of life. Pain is the proof of existence.

thus, in a sense, we are all doomed. even if we stay away from black holes

It's not very smart to keep trying to do something you can't do and never will be able to do.

One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.

Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason - can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to re-frame violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods And now the final frame. Love is a losing game.

A woman I knew just drowned herself The well was deep and muddy She was just shaking off futility Or punishing somebody My friends were calling up all day yesterday All emotions and abstractions It seems we all live so close to that line and so far from satisfaction

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes.

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

But in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason.

How easy it is, to waste a life.

We've worn our words to death, when now I say: my love, nothing happens, absolutely nothing. And yet, before the words were spent, I'm certain that everything trembled at the mere murmur of your name in the silence of my heart. Now we have nothing to give. There is nothing within you that asks me for water. The past is useless as a rag. And I've told you already: the words are spent. Good-bye.

The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.

We work hard for something, get it and then find we don't want it. We struggle for years to get to the top and find life there thoroughly boring.

The plows of persecution aren't working, and the oxherds haven't even noticed! They plod back and forth, unaware that their opposition is worthless.

Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy.