Quotes About Futility

Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it's probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come.

This novel was doomed from the start. All posture and no substance. Whether I write one page or a hundred, it amounts to the same thing. Though I knew this from the start.

It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.

Your numerous worldly pursuits that are not causes for liberation or omniscient enlightenment will, in addition to being futile, only cause further sarnsaric misery. So it is essential to exert yourself, heart and soul and in thought, word, and deed, in accomplishing the unexcelled enlightenment!

even though she knew that nothing good could come from wanting at the world.

nothing good could come from wanting at the world.

These poor, rich men who, seeing that you can't be caught, attempt to buy a thing they know cannot be bought.

I had watched a hundred men dash themselves to pieces against Denna like ships attempting to ignore the tide.

It is the luxury of looking backward. You can do it forever, and it is useless.

and that looking for her would serve about as much purpose as calling for a cat.

I won't have any part of it. Not for the world. Trying to help right now would be like trying to put out a fire with my hands. Painful, and with no real results.

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hop of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hope of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

Cleaning the bathroom for thirty minutes is unpleasant, but wouldn't it be worse to spend a half hour cleaning a Sisyphean bathroom, one that stayed dirty no matter how much you scrubbed it?

Yes, me, I prefer the hourglass so you can smash it when I tell you of eternity's lie —Paul Celan, "[Blinded by giant leaps]," Romanian Poems (Green Integer, 2003)

Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake".

Yes, there is another important category of feelings that matter to you, and these are the feelings of purpose and pointlessness you feel. I will use these adjectives as shorthand for a range of positive and negative feelings, such as fulfillment, meaning, and worthwhileness on the one hand and boredom and futility on the other.

And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.

Pathos is sad and inspires pity, but is not very interesting because there is nothing to learn from it; the audience experiences mostly pity and futility.

I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.

a genius of means, barren of ends

La búsqueda de sentido está condenada al fracaso de antemano porque la vida no tiene "sentido", pero eso no significa que no valga la pena vivirla.

Everything becomes rubbish in the end. We sometimes wonder if people weren't invented as an extra-quick way of making rubbish.

It was always a puzzle, given that he spent his days achieving nothing, that he had no time for anything.