Quotes About Futile

It is pathetic, though. Is it not? You and I, both in pursuit of a ghost

right. It's hopeless

The wish to have everything by one's own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one's own life, and the desire to calculate what one has 'earned' on one's own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole.

Resistance is useless.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

Expired condoms are like nuclear waste: there's nothing sensible you can do with it.

Producing more reams of detailed policies that have marginal and limited effects on our society is futile.

And nothing to look backward to with pride,And nothing to look forward to with hope.

To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can't be done.

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

It now seemed futile to try to halt a British advance upon the capital.

lawn. Yard work summed up the whole futile procedure. First you spend a lot of time and money making the grass grow, just so you can spend a lot of time and money cutting it down again a little while later. You curse about it getting too long, and then you worry about it staying too short and you sprinkle expensive water on it all summer, and expensive chemicals all fall.

Retaliation is a dog chasing its tail

The results are about as meaningful as a sixth toe - gives you something to look at, but doesn't do a damn thing.

And, beside the innumerable purely subjective advantages, there are the rich objective rewards. A dream-picture brings no buyer, a dream-plan no dividends, a fantasied book is followed by no royalty statements. Crass as this may sound in a world which spends a great deal of its breath in persuading futilitarians that they have chosen the better part, it is the literal truth and stands for a truth still greater.

I could hear him swallowing hard, trying not to cry. Why is it that we always try to be brave at moments when bravery is futile?

I realize that advice is worth what it costs--that is, nothing.

Most arguments are useless.

We remain unnecessarily worried. All worries are futile because that which is going to happen is going to happen.

Mention should be made of the constant interplay between love and the desire for clothes, insatiable, though I suspect futile with regard to desire in general. Uncertainty gives these meetings an unbridled, violent intensity. No absolutely mandatory tasks are imposed on me from outside. Freedom makes me prone to passion, so very occupying. There is an inexhaustible charm to secrecy.

He looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. He had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die....

But someone afflicted by tedium feels himself the prisoner of a futile freedom, in a cell of infinite size.

His voice was dull and tremulous, the voice of one who hopes for nothing, because all hope is vain.

Everything seems doomed in advance to insignificance.