Quotes About Futile

We live in a miserable world, where the best we can honestly hope for is that one empty, meaningless day will follow another without things getting actively worse.

BORN UNDER A THREEPENNY HALFPENNY PLANET, NEVER TO BE WORTH A GROAT. Said of any person remarkably unsuccessful in his attempts or profession. BOTCH.

It seemed to me that there were just two possibilities. Either no God existed, or there did exist a deity who was monstrous if powerful and futile if powerless.

It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if … or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together.

What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, forever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous.

Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.

What we finally do, out of desperation ... is go on an impossible, or even forbidden, journey or pilgrimage, which from a rational point of view is futile: to find the one wise man, whomever or wherever he may be; and to find from him the secret of eternal life or the secret of adjusting to this life as best we can.

But despair and nihilism had been eating into me for years. The more I saw of the sad and futile dead, hovering at the edge of life like beggars at the door of a fancy restaurant, the grimmer and more hopeless the whole universe looked to me. If there was a God, my reasoning went, he was either a psychopath or a fuck-up-nobody you could respect would ever have created a universe where you got one chance to warm your hands at the fire, and then you spent the rest of eternity out in the cold.

It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.

People just... disappear, he says. The Earth just opens up and swallows people, I say, some what sadly, checking my Rolex. Eerie. Kimball yawns, stretching. Really eerie. Ominous. I nod my agreement. It's just- he sights, exasperated- futile.

Without an ultimate authority for truth, all human striving has no ultimate value, and life itself becomes futile. Modern trends in preaching that deny the authority of the Word 8 in the name of intellectual sophistication lead to a despairing subjectivism in which people do what is right in their own eyes— a state whose futility Scripture has clearly articulated (Judg. 21: 25).

To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed on its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth – all this is surely vain and futile.

Whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading.

Anyone who tries to diss me in comparison to Queen, it just renders all their criticisms completely futile. That's quite pleasurable.

You may believe that civilization deafens us with tens of thousands of voices, but listen well to that clamour, for with each renewed burst so disparate and myriad, an ancient force awakens, drawing each noise ever closer, until the chorus forms but two sides, each battling the other. The bloody lines are drawn, fought in the turning away of faces, in the stoppering of ears, the cold denial, and all discourse, at the last, is revealed as futile and worthless.

Aretino was a satirist on the noble if futile quest to reform his corrupt society by shoving its face in its worse excesses. (Futile because has any society ever reformed itself after being shown the error of its ways by a satirist? anywhere? ever?)

Her death was as insignificant as her life.

Having a method without materials to which it can be applied is as useless as having the materials with no method to apply to them.

talking about it was like stirring a fresh cow pile with a wooden spoon. Didn't accomplish a thing, and only made the stink and the flies worse and the spoon useless for anything else. Then

When we consider these simple facts, we see how absolutely futile are the attempts that have been made to draw a parallel between the story told by so much of the crust of the earth as is known to us and the story which Milton tells.

To attempt to advise conceited people is like whistling against the wind.

If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires. Prayer

If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.