Quotes About Futility

Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.

What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?-- Most men eddy about Here and there--eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die-- Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

The man who to untimely death is doomed Vainly would hedge him in from the assault of harm; He bears the seed of ruin in himself.

Le véritable renonçant est parfaitement sain d'esprit et bien informé de ce qui se passe autour de lui. Il ne fuit pas le monde parce qu'il est incapable de le gérer, mais se désintéresse des préoccupations futiles parce qu'il en voit les inconvénients.

Do you want your name to live forever? You fool! Forget your name, try to save yourself! What use there is for you, if your name lives and you die? You fool!

You frantically want to make a mark on the history of humanity? You, King of the Fools! In the very distant future, there shall be no history; there shall remain not even a single trace of anything!

Men who do things are men who are already dead.

War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

Have you ever heard of a poet named Cavafy?" I told him no. "A Greek poet. Gay, in fact. He wrote a poem about a young dissolute man who tires of his life and resolves to move to a new city and mend his ways. The poet's comment is that moving away is futile because, having ruined his life in one place, he has ruined it everywhere.

Talking to morons like that is like pissing in a urinal full of cigarette butts, like shitting in a toilet full of Tampax: nothing gets flushed, and everything starts to stink.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

I spent whole afternoons at Bon Marché looking at pullovers, there was no sense in going on like that.

Qui moétais-je pour avoir cru que je pouvais changer quelque chose au mouvement du monde ?

Il n'y a pas beaucoup à gagner dans ce monde : le

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

Like so much that is true, it was of no help at all.

You may as well expect pears from an elm.

People don't know how to love. They bite rather than kiss. They slap rather than stroke. Maybe it's because they recognize how easy it is for love to go bad, to become suddenly impossible... unworkable, an exercise of futility. So they avoid it and seek solace in angst, and fear, and aggression, which are always there and readily available. Or maybe sometimes... they just don't have all the facts.

NEVER Teach a Pig to Sing, It Wastes Your Time and Annoys the Pig.

All the waters in the oceans won't fill a bucket with a hole in it

Never teach a pig to sing!

And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.

In the Greek myth, Sisyphus, with great effort, rolls a large rock up a mountain. At the top, the rock, of its own inertia, rolls back down again. Doomed to roll the rock up the mountain over and over again to no avail—this is what life often feels like to those in extreme despair.

Odonda je prošlo ve? mnogo vremena a on nije naslikao ništa poslije ona dva-tri sretna jesenja dana on nije dugo ve? doživio ništa što bi bilo vrijedno da se uop?e doživi vu?e se po kavanama živi me?u ovim dvonošcima koji nose kišobrane i uvijek kada govore govore o ne?em stvarnom o kruhu ili o mesu mi?u ?eljustima i zubalima od kau?uka a sve je jalovo i nema nikakvog višeg razloga za opstanak.