Futile Quotes

#1. Alas, the world turned out so very different from the noble battleground she had led me to expect. The stakes were puny, the people gray and gutless; my Amazon arts were futile here.

Anne Fortier

#2. Why charm anyone? What a futile exercise it seemed now! People blew away like dandelion thistles, carried off by death or indifference or sheer, inexplicable whim. Why bother to grasp at them? One would only be disappointed eventually.

Meredith Duran

#3. If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)

Roland Barthes

#4. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#5. Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway.

Mahatma Gandhi

#6. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!

Anthony Doerr

#7. Getting up and criticising the other fellow because he's in and you are not seems to me a futile waste of time. Especially as you know in your heart that you would be doing more or less the same thing if you were in his place.

Ryan Shawcross

#8. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

Richard Matheson

#9. We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

Clarence Darrow

#10. And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.

Victor Hugo

#11. I drifted off after a while, staring at the only star visible through the thick covering of leaves. Hope seemed a futile wish, but I troubled the lonely star to grant it anyway.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#12. In our discussions here at the forum there was no trace of the futile debate about what is better, capitalism or socialism ... We should seek a synthesis of ideas and values that have proven their viability ...

Mikhail Gorbachev

#13. What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us to futile activity,
And in the end, Judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

T. S. Eliot

#14. Built to be lonely
to love the absent.
Find me
Free me
from this
corrosive doubt
futile despair
horror in repose.
I can fill my space
fill my time
but nothing can fill this void in my heart.

Sarah Kane

#15. Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#16. Every sin is an act of cosmic treason, a futile attempt to dethrone God in His sovereign authority.

R.C. Sproul

#17. Kind prince there is nothing in the realm of ideas that is absolute, therefore all efforts to form ideologies are ultimately futile.

Lao-Tzu

#18. Live in hope. Because things do happen. Things do change. Worry really is futile. Don't fear the future. Dreams do come true.

Miranda Hart

#19. That love seemed to increase their desire to undo the corporations that made them. It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique, Nash thought. And more futile, naturally.

Dana Spiotta

#20. Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable

Derek R. Audette

#21. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper.

H.P. Lovecraft

#22. Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius.

Michael Eric Dyson

#23. To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.

Rabindranath Tagore

#24. Getting up, going to bed, preparing food, eating food
we futile creatures must struggle all the time. Nothing that we need comes to us; we must reach for everything.

Frank Delaney

#25. I've always thought preaching to the converted is just kind of futile and silly.

Patterson Hood

#26. Or is life so filled with random action that the very notion of caution is futile?

Holly Goldberg Sloan

#27. From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost ...

David Nicholls

#28. Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don't escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.

Osho

#29. I've seen all I need to. I'm going to go drink now in a futile effort to wipe away the memory of this debacle.

Richelle Mead

#30. Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

Christopher Hitchens

#31. Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

Ayn Rand

#32. To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Everybody is unhappy simply because of unfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn't available.

Ayya Khema

#33. Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

Ambrose Bierce

#34. To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

Alfred Stieglitz

#35. Envy is resentment of good things that happen to other people. Jealousy increases the importance of the person we wish belonged only to us. Envy, as I told you, is poison, and futile - we want to be the other person. But jealousy is generous - we want the other person to be ours.

Carlos Fuentes

#36. Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government, and I will lead it as a party of government.

Tony Blair

#37. The more idealism proves futile, the more I respect idealists.

Marty Rubin

#38. If you're waiting for my good looks to fade ... it's a futile waste of time. Give up at once. - (Christian Wright)

Jennifer DeLucy

#39. The human species is an animal species without very much variation within it, and it is idle and futile to imagine that a voyage to Tibet, say, will discover an entirely different harmony with nature or eternity.

Christopher Hitchens

#40. I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing.

Cheryl Strayed

#41. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

Regina Brett

#42. I decided that life rationally considered seemed pointless and futile, but it is still interesting in a variety of ways, including the study of science. So why not carry on, following the path of scientific hedonism? Besides, I did not have the courage for the more rational procedure of suicide.

Robert S. Mulliken

#43. An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

John B. S. Haldane

#44. If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love.

Alan W. Watts

#45. It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.

Carl Andre

#46. You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.

Mignon McLaughlin

#47. Nothing can prepare you for living or working with a sociopathic serial bully. It is the most devastating, draining, misunderstood, and ultimately futile experience imaginable.

Tim Field

#48. All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it ... Then you understand the horror of war.

Norman Schwarzkopf

#49. You have to know that there actually is a transcendental something, if you are going to free anybody from anything - if there is no beyond-the-given, there is no freedom from the given, and liberation is futile.

Ken Wilber

#50. It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.

Dejan Stojanovic

#51. It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.

Ayn Rand

#52. Soundlessly whispering into the void, my lips moving quickly, silently, without ceasing. Calling his name, calling him to me.
Even though there's no use.
Even though it's futile.
Even though it's way past too late.

Alyson Noel

#53. You may be right, dead right, as you speed along in your argument; but as far as changing another's mind is concerned, you will probably be just as futile as if you were wrong.

Dale Carnegie

#54. A reminder that circumstances and the world can be controlled, no matter how futile and lost some moments might feel.

J. Kenner

#55. Return now to these studies and they will keep you safe. They will comfort you, they will delight you; and if they will genuinely penetrate your mind, never again will grief enter there, or anxiety, or the distress caused by futile and pointless suffering.

Seneca.

#56. In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.

Brennan Manning

#57. I was jumping rope. Everything was fine. And then suddenly everything seemed so futile.

Charles M. Schulz

#58. Mad Rogan: "Resistance is futile."
Nevada: "You are not assimilating me!

Ilona Andrews

#59. In this shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical barriers. Real security will be found only in law and in justice.

Harry S. Truman

#60. Tax season always means a deluge of tax advice. Unfortunately, most of it is futile and lightweight.

Robert Kiyosaki

#61. I don't like argumentation. You men do it a lot, don't you? You seem to enjoy it. I'm always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion

Soseki Natsume

#62. We do not make mistakes. Surrender at once! Resistance is fertile!"
"Don't you mean futile?"
" ... That's what I said! Surrender or die!

Toby Frost

#63. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair, and I will begin to think again.

Sylvia Plath

#64. Hunger and cold, ill-health and pain are nothing. They pass. The thing that remains is ignorant criticism, well-meaning but futile advice, the contempt of a subordinate, the feelings of the underdog.

Alice Foote MacDougall

#65. But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

Nikola Tesla

#66. The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.

Bruce Schneier

#67. Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive.

John Irving

#68. God, these guys were like fucking Terminators. Or Borg. Resistance is futile and all that shit. It was clear she wasn't going to shake the Brothers From Hell.

Larissa Ione

#69. It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed - to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!

Joyce Carol Oates

#70. 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.

Bret Easton Ellis

#71. The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.

Chris Hedges

#72. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

John Williams

#73. Making something new to look at is a futile and empty act if its only audience is the eyes.

Joseph Kosuth

#74. Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.

Abu Bakr

#75. There is no such thing as motivation in my world. I am not motivated to do what I do. As an artist, I am driven, I am compelled, I am thrust forward by a force so rooted inside me, so convincing, that it seems futile to try to explain it. Although it has a name: passion.

Philippe Petit

#76. How noble. Oh we would fell many ... -you with magic and blade, whilst my weapons would be tooth and claw-but it would be futile in the end. They are too numerous ... We cannot defeat them, only be defeated. - Saphira

Christopher Paolini

#77. I didn't understand, either, but love had no sense sometimes. Pondering the why of it was futile.

Jeaniene Frost

#78. It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.

Bertrand De Jouvenel

#79. Only the pointless is worthwhile, all else is futile.

Giovanna Stefani

#80. I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it.

Kevin Myers

#81. It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

Eric Hoffer

#82. Most people imagine that a man suffers because out of the blue, Death snatches away the woman he loves. But his real suffering is less futile; it comes from the discovery that grief, too, cannot last. Even grief is vanity!

Albert Camus

#83. I like to watch mankind in its futile attempt to understand the unknown, when they don't even understand that which they know.

Terrence Howard

#84. Though I knew in my mind that others had felt such loss, this loss was mine, and I felt that no one would ever understand it, and to try to explain the lonliness and pain I felt would be futile.

Linda Hawley

#85. It is futile to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know, because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless, my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in the privacy of my study.

P.G. Wodehouse

#86. Nobody adores fertilizer. Nobody devotes their life to fertilizer (unless they own a fertilizer company). But, shit, you need it to grow the crops. The land is arid and dry without it, and trying to grow things is likely to be futile.

Shellen Lubin

#87. The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#88. A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty. No, it is not possible that minds degraded by a multitude of futile concerns would ever raise themselves to anything great. Even when they had the strength for that, the courage would be missing.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#89. suppose, if you had to call it something, you could say that that was our civil war. It was too big a thing, too tied up in moral certainties to be called a mutiny, too small and ultimately futile to be called a revolution.

Frank Tayell

#90. We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.

Paul Hawken

#91. Most of these stops and searches are futile. It has been estimated that 95 percent of Pipeline stops yield no illegal drugs.

Michelle Alexander

#92. The Way of a Warrior is based on humanity, love, and sincerity; the heart of martial valor is true bravery, wisdom, love, and friendship. Emphasis on the physical aspects of warriorship is futile, for the power of the body is always limited.

Morihei Ueshiba

#93. What happens when we're willing to feel bad is that, sure enough, we often feel bad - but without the stress of futile avoidance. Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined.

Martha Beck

#94. I learned that I was never alone, that there was Someone always very close by and, indeed, within me, giving me strength in times of weakness and desolation, light in times of darkness, joy in times of great sorrow and pain, and the will to struggle on when continuing seemed futile.

Joseph F. Girzone

#95. It is futile to talk too much about the past ... like trying to make birth control retroactive.

Charles Erwin Wilson

#96. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

Bertrand Russell

#97. Futile. She was telling me it was useless. That I was useless.

Ruta Sepetys

#98. By the way, I've decided there's no such thing as a simple life. It's futile to even pursue one.

Elizabeth Brundage

#99. Every year the State will be the dog that chases its own tail ... engaging in a futile attempt to close a perpetual budget gap.

Richard J. Codey

#100. It is futile to debate on what is wrong and right with people whose remorse is not their punishment, nor is it reasonable to care about their promise and criticism.

Khem Veasna