Quotes About Futility

Worrying is as futile as boredom, but harder work.

The Cul-de-Sac ( French for "dead end" ) ... is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes

It just seems to useless to have to work so hard, and nothing ever really seem to come from it.

Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.

Weeping for the dead's a waste of breath - they're lucky, they can't die again.

I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back..." To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais...

No matter what we do in this life, all the information we gather and all the knowledge we accumulate and all the effort we make to amass wealth through work and business—when the time comes for us to leave this life, all of it is futile and in vain. It will not help us in any way whatsoever. I can easily say this since I am not educated at all! So I can smile and act big about this. Don't be angry, please.

There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.

When I was 19 and I had lots of hope. Now, of course, I have none whatever. One wouldn't. One doesn't. I have a hope for a painless death. That's all that bothers me. Paul Bowles to Richard de Combray

The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

Why not simply surrender to one's doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?

insight," and the "message" of his books (which is no message at all) is similar to Gogol's in Nabokov's summary: "Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in petty pursuits that seem to them very important, while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." By reputation Portis is reclusive, yet

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said more than three thousand years ago.

Throw eggs at a rock, and though one uses all the eggs in the world, the rock remains the same.

Happiness "disappears in a moment," he says, "like a dewdrop on a blade of grass."* Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living.

The futility of samsara. Samsara is preferring death to life. It comes from always trying to create safety zones. We get stuck here because we cling to a funny little identity that gives us some kind of security, painful though it may be. The fourth reminder is to remember the futility of this strategy.

Why was everyone so interested in her now? When it was too late to change anything? What was the point?

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake. Sam

You cannot get off the treadmill simply by running faster. All you can do by that mechanism is temporarily pass others, until they respond by running faster too, with the long-term consequence of having the whole field increase their speed just to stand still. The victor in such a race is not the runner, but the treadmill.

Life doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.

The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning.