Quotes About Futility

Boredom, the numbing, annual predictability of life hung over the staff like a cloud. And it was real boredom, not my modish ennui. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect that they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility

I read a story once about a guy who killed himself. Some shrink was going on about the futility of trying to understand it. It's impossible, makes no sense at all. Once a person reaches that point, he's in another world, one that his survivors will never understand.

A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.

We tell him, now, that he might have helped her that time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats.

Men can labor to make sense out of single steps toward the goal without ever pausing to reflect that the goal itself is ludicrous.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.

Defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom, and above all futility.

War has always seemed to me a foolish choice for men. Whatever they win from it, they will have only a handful of years to enjoy before they die. More likely they will perish trying.

If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing.

War has always seemed to me a foolish choice for men. Whatever they wi from it, they will only have a handful of years enjoy before they die. More likely they will perish trying.

Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again. Cooking food seems similarly pointless. She cooks it, they eat it and then, later on, they eat more.

Only against death does man cry out in vain.

Andorinha Andorinha lá fora está dizendo: — "Passei o dia à toa, à toa!" Andorinha, andorinha, minha cantiga é mais triste! Passei a vida à toa, à toa . . .

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

Scratching their nails on the blackboard of futility.

Scratching their fingernails on blackboards of futility.

Although, honestly, watching authors fistfight is like watching geese play Jeopardy. There's a lot of honking and squawking but no one ever gets to what they're supposed to be doing.

There is a saying along the lines of not trying to teach a pig to sing because it wastes your time and annoys the pig. I want you to know how many times I have stood in pig-filled rooms, and longed to annoy. I

They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head.

They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.

Things have to be beautifully made, even if they are full of fun, fantasy and futility

It's important to note that there's no such thing as perfect happiness, just as there's no such thing as perfect despair. This is why trying to be perfect is an exercise in futility.

Human life must be some form of mistake

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.