Quotes About Futility

Esperar lo que nunca ocurrirá es una muerte demasiado horrible.

Elle aurait aimé, si l'orgueil Pareil à la lampe inutile Qu'on allume près d'un cercueil, N'eût veillé sur son coeur stérile. Elle est morte, et n'a point vécu. Elle faisait semblant de vivre. De ses mains est tombé le livre, Dans lequel elle n'a rien lu.

Meurs ! tu es l'ennemi de tout ce qui aime ; affaisse-toi sur ta solitude, n'attends pas la vieillesse ; ne laisse pas d'enfant sur la terre, ne féconde pas un sang corrompu ; efface-toi comme la fumée, ne prive pas le grain de blé qui pousse d'un rayon de soleil !

What is the use of building an expensive house when it will soon be sacked?

Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.

I have wasted my hours.

At its heart, 'Fat City' is not about boxing. It is a universal story of grim realities and toxic delusions. It is awash with awareness of chances blown, dreams stymied, precious time wasted, and all future prospects scorched to ashes by the process.

If I were on a committee, I'd be wasting my time.

I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.

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.

Kafka experienced it at the movies and in Yitzhak Löwy's burlesque theater. And yet he made slapstick the medium of a chilling message: We fidget not because we are alive but because we get crushed the moment we stop.

yo iba a hacer un daño un día, yo de viejo iba a ser otro experto en cómo perderlo todo, y ni siquiera ella habría podido evitarlo.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn't drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder

What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs,"4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

It's useless to lecture a human.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.

I have to. I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.

y cuando pasó volando por la quinta planta, agitando los brazos en vano

he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

He's like an old clock the won't tell time but won't stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock that keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

All great power has to do to destroy itself is persist in trying to do the impossible.

Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.