Top 100 Futility Of Quotes
#1. There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Elliot Richardson
#2. But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. I even get tired performing standup, which is normally a low-impact exercise in futility but looks hard the way I do it. That's why I take a lot of breaks, often stopping in the middle of a joke to catch my breath, or blame the crowd for not laughing before the punchline.
Andy Kindler
#4. Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility.
Sarah Waters
#5. One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.
Dorothy Day
#6. I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Soren Kierkegaard
#7. You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their thoughts. Ephesians 4:17
Beth Moore
#8. Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.
Marquis De Sade
#9. The author of the Mahabharata has not established the necessity of physical warfare; on the contrary he has proved its futility.
Mahatma Gandhi
#10. The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.
Joseph Conrad
#11. The chief lesson to be learnt from it is the futility of all argumentation that precedes understanding. We cannot profitably attack any opinion until we have discovered what it expresses as well as what it states.
Ivor A. Richards
#12. All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.
Russell Brand
#13. The acme of futility was to regret a pleasure that was past, and he had no intention of doing so.
Winston Graham
#14. How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn't die no matter how hard they tried.
Dalton Trumbo
#15. Happiness is living by inner purpose, not by outer pressures. Happiness is having a sense of meaning, not a feeling of futility.
David W Augsburger
#16. We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep.
Steven Erikson
#17. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#18. Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a 'war on terrorism' is a contradiction in terms.
Howard Zinn
#20. The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.
Confucius
#21. Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
Michel Foucault
#22. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I ...
F Scott Fitzgerald
#23. Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.
Cullen Hightower
#24. You were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
Charles Bukowski
#25. Faith, courage, optimism, looking forward, bring us new life and more life. Futility, frustration, living in the past are not only characteristic of 'old age'; they contribute to it.
Maxwell Maltz
#26. American consumers benefit from disparity & exploitation. I benefit from disparity & exploitation & so does my family. there is no way to be a consumer in this country without causing pain" --casey gray - author of Discount - & my New HERO
Casey Gray
#27. It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
Cesare Pavese
#28. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
Errol Morris
#29. The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#30. It has nothing to do with your desires and their fulfillment, with your hopes and their fulfillment; it is already the case. But to see the celebration that is already happening at the deepest core of your being you will have to drop becoming, you will have to understand the futility of becoming.
Rajneesh
#31. What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death?
Francois Mauriac
#32. Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran
#33. Indeed if fish had fish-lore and Wise-fish, it is probable that the business of anglers would be very little hindered.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#34. Our search for safety and contentment is endless and inexhaustible precisely because of the intrinsic futility of relying on human abilities to provide resolution to our problems.
Dallas Willard
#35. No political party can ever make prohibition effective. A political party implies an adverse, an opposing, political party. To enforce criminal statutes implies substantial unanimity in the community. This is the result of the jury system. Hence the futility of party prohibition.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#36. ignorance to a certain degree can be corrected but, it shall always be an effort in futility to correct a certain degree of ignorance!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#37. Like Goethe at 80, you know the futility of love and you shrug
you shrug away the warm kiss
Jack Kerouac
#38. ...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#39. Possibly the only thing we Notekillers place on a higher pedestal than music is laughs, so, of course, we also know that the idea of the title is a kind of humorous futility.
David First
#40. It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
Joseph Conrad
#41. The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and they were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.
J.K. Rowling
#43. Any story about revenge is ultimately a story about forgiveness, redemption, or the futility of revenge.
Nick Wechsler
#44. In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
Jean Baudrillard
#45. The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.
Maya Angelou
#47. The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility
Eric Hoffer
#48. Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.
Abba Eban
#49. Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.
Isaac Asimov
#50. In Zen Buddhism, "The Great Cessation" is a term that points to the abandoning of the effort to define one's self by any outer definition and to give up acts of futility. It is to let the world remain a mystery that cannot be captured by science, language, or any invention of the mind
Mike Scheidt
#51. The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.
Joseph Conrad
#52. After digging a thousand wells of my own and stumbling upon a thousand others dug by the hands of thirsty men, I have yet to realize that the only well that can satiate every thirst is the one that men will never dig.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#53. God created a good world that was subjected to futility because of the sinful, treasonous choice of the first human beings.
John Piper
#54. [B]etter the beauty of struggle and futility than the illusion of accomplishment; for as we struggle, he would seem to say, so are we beautiful.
Evan Dara
#55. I keep life filled and speeded up so that I can cheat myself into believing that I am happy and contented, but oh! When night comes and I go to bed and turn out the lights, I lie there in the dark, I realize the absolute futility of trying to kid myself.
Margaret Mitchell
#56. Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.
H. Rider Haggard
#57. When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives.
Albert Einstein
#58. How I hated the dark part of me that continually foretold of failure or futility.
Jeaniene Frost
#59. A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and the validity of the pursuit.
Jean Helion
#60. The realisation of where he was suddenly dawned on the youth in chains, who stopped abruptly, recoiling like a fugitive at the edge of a cliff, and swallowed noisily in the obscure silence.
Stanley Goldyn
#61. Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.
Derek Landy
#62. The difficulty in dealing with a maze or labyrinth lies not so much in navigating the convolutions to find the exit but in not entering the damn thing in the first place.
Or, at least not yet again.
As a creature of free will, do not be tempted into futility.
Vera Nazarian
#63. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#64. There is a mortal breed most full of futility. In contempt of what is at hand, they strain into the future, hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes.
Pindar
#65. The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.
Giacomo Leopardi
#66. It is when we finally realize the futility of violence and the invalidity of war will we, the people of this world finally wake up!
Avijeet Das
#67. To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.
Sri Aurobindo
#69. But then he'd lived long enough to understand the futility of expecting anything at all
Laura Barnett
#70. those whom love has held, has held here in time
curious, in this labyrinth of roses - it
will go on holding, though in cruelty - of
stars we could not reach for, but still remembered.
John Daniel Thieme
#71. It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.
Dejan Stojanovic
#73. The concept of a general equilibrium has no relevance to the real world (in other words, classical economics is an exercise in futility).
George Soros
#74. There is one sure means in life of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility and disillusionment. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.
Michael Chabon
#75. I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility.
Henry Miller
#76. She taught me the pointlessness of wishing for a different past and the futility of worrying about all of the frightening futures over which I had no control.
James R. Doty
#77. The end of the world revealed the futility of all commemorative plaques.
Tommy Wallach
#78. To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#79. How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.
Elena Ferrante
#80. Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.
Stanley Hauerwas
#81. With all his soul he wanted to sweep her to him and tell her everything was going to be all right. To erase that awful bleakness from her face and with his two strong arms reshape the world for her, to make everything all right. But he had learned long ago the futility of racing from the truth.
Leigh Bristol
#82. Since crime often grows out of a sense of futility and despair, Negro parents must be urged to give their children the love, attention, and sense of belonging that a segregated society deprives them of.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#83. We will snatch purpose from the jaws of futility.
Andrew Hussie
#84. Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live ... They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.
Shirley Chisholm
#85. Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life - birth, death, self-deluding futility - go rushing to a teacher wise to the ways of the things that matter most.
Huston Smith
#86. As the Greeks saw it, to be a man was to be defined by your ability to exert power in a world articulated through transcendent forces ultimately beyond human control. The apparent futility of this perspective was outweighed by the nobility that came with the struggle.
Thomas Van Nortwick
#87. I used to tweet, but it's an act of futility. You're not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, 'Oh my God!' because you've opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers.
Sylvester Stallone
#88. I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it.
Marilynne Robinson
#89. Things have to be beautifully made, even if they are full of fun, fantasy and futility
Karl Lagerfeld
#90. In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation.
Adam Gopnik
#91. It was a blur," people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation.
Diana Gabaldon
#92. George Weston, after all was only a man - poor thing - and his wife made full use of every device which a clumsier and more scrupulous sex has learned, with reason and futility, to fear.
Isaac Asimov
#93. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.
Jon Krakauer
#94. Here you can easily understand the futility of ambitions and achievements, futility of success and failures, futility of wealth and possessions.
Girdhar Joshi
#95. The majority of people cannot endure the bareness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves.
Eric Hoffer
#96. Why will men fight and suffer to advance the interests of their masters, who fling them aside when they have no further use for them?
Arthur Findlay
#97. How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed
to any other qualities than those of brutes.
Aleister Crowley
#98. Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
P.D. James
#99. Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread,
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#100. Ecclesiastes 7:20 clearly sounds the futility of legalism: There is not a righteous man on earth / who does what is right and never sins.
Beth Moore
