Quotes About Futility

As a historian, Titus saw a sad and bitter irony in such a twist of fortune, and he looked on the games themselves as yet another example of the futility of human affairs, the endless cycle of violence and larceny attended by empty promises, half-truths, and outright lies. The crowd, on the other hand, including his fellow senators, seemed merely to see the grand spectacle as it occurred in the moment.

It is very hard to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Honestly, some days it's like trying to get an angry ginger tom into a pair of Lycra cycling shorts.

There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.

I've never begged. not for anything... except my mother's love.And that was a useless waste of time.

I didn't know how I could want things so badly while making it impossible to ever get them.

No, no, said the librarian, forgiven for being alive, for being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it.

forgiven for being alive, for being in the world. For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it. That's your feeling, she added, your internal logic. You've just explained that to me.

August's list of good things: Sun. Stars. Pails. Birth. The harvest. Numbers. Sounds. Window. Straw. Frint. Beams. Futility. My mother. My father. Language. Flies. Manure. Wind. Women.

She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named - when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion towards the people who invented the concept of telling time. How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.

People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime.

he felt as if he were trying to move a glacier with a frozen chicken.

Hope is cruel and has no consequence

Vanitas peccata mundi.

Being mad is no good. Nothing we can do is any good. That's the way it seems to me. All we can do is go around telling the truth.

Oh, that fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

If the actions of Hitler, Gandhi, Jesus Christ, anyone who had ever existed or would ever exist, were all meaningless, then surely sitting down next to Brandy Beltmeyer was equally meaningless.

Wenn Man an den Tod denkt, alles ist lächerlich. (When one thinks of death, everything is ridiculous).

We don't have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.

Lebenslängliche Theaterkerkerhaft ohne die geringste Begnadigungsmöglichkeit Und doch niemals aufgegeben Strafanstalt als Theater Zehntausende Insassen die alle keine Aussicht auf Begnadigung haben Nur die Todesstrafe ist ihnen allen sicher

Mais, lui, ne voulant pas renier son caractère, avait, avant de se suicider, brûlé l'œuvre de sa vie, la rendant au néant en quelques instants, après avoir consacré des dizaines d'années à la mener à bien, et il n'avait pas voulu la laisser à une postérité qui ne la méritait en aucun cas (Génie).

Cuando me acuesto, no tengo otro deseo que morir, no despertarme más, pero entonces me despierto otra vez y ese espantoso proceso se repite, se repite en definitiva durante cincuenta años, según él. Si pensamos que, durante cincuenta años, no hemos deseado otra cosa que estar muertos, y que seguimos viviendo aún y no podemos cambiar nada, porque somos totalmente inconsecuentes, según él. Porque somos la miseria misma, la bajeza misma.

To attempt to advise conceited people is like whistling against the wind.

Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them. And