Futility Of Quotes

#1. 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

#2. But then he'd lived long enough to expect the futility of ever expecting anything at all

Laura Barnett

#3. You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their thoughts. Ephesians 4:17

Beth Moore

#4. 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

#5. Increasingly agitated, he tried to shout, but the only sound to come out of his mouth was a hoarse whisper, too small to be heard outside the room. The look on his face was heartrending to see, as he realized the futility of his strangled efforts.

Sherwin B. Nuland

#6. 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

#7. The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.

Arthur Koestler

#8. You realize the futility of worry. You learn to hate the small and the little. Life is a pie which you cut in large slices, not grudgingly, not sparingly. You know your limitations and proceed to eliminate them; your abilities, and proceed to develop them. You are free.

Alice Foote MacDougall

#9. Accustomed as I am to public speaking, I know the futility of it.

Franklin P. Adams

#10. 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

#11. The fatal futility of Fact.

Henry James

#12. I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.

Richard Dawkins

#13. Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.

Isaac Asimov

#14. Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.

George Carlin

#15. 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

#16. Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.

Cullen Hightower

#17. 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

#18. Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.

Coleman Barks

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Closing the last chapter of our personal history and taking the first step on the Journey will come with the recognition of the futility of spiritual seeking.

Frank M. Wanderer

#23. 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

#24. She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it.

Ayn Rand

#25. She had been feeling it more and more lately. The walls were closing in around her. The emptiness, the thoughts hidden behind thick walls of work. The unfathomable futility of it all.

Joakim Zander

#26. 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

#27. Sometimes the act of walking in the face of the elements helps us come to grips with reality. Or it simply exhausts us to the point of seeing the futility of resisting reality and the futility of denial.

John Ashcroft

#28. Like Goethe at 80, you know the futility of love and you shrug
you shrug away the warm kiss

Jack Kerouac

#29. There is a law out there, if not of thermodynamics then of something equally primary and inescapable, that explains why everything from instant messaging to fabulous sex to aspic can in the end be defined as an illustration of the futility of existence. And it really, really sucks.

Julie Powell

#30. ...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.

#31. What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is it the only value passing time as comfortably as possible?

John Green

#32. As the situation developed, the futility of attempting suicide in the middle of a hospital became apparent.

Stieg Larsson

#33. Blake is a ready-made patron saint for those wanting to elevate their marginality, dissent, and queerness into strength. The relative futility of Blake's battle during his lifetime make him all the more attractive. In the intertextual heritage of queer art, Blake has become an honorary icon.

Andrew Elfenbein

#34. Any story about revenge is ultimately a story about forgiveness, redemption, or the futility of revenge.

Nick Wechsler

#35. There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.

Leonard Woolf

#36. The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -

Janette Turner Hospital

#37. Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.

Abba Eban

#38. Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.

Isaac Asimov

#39. The Frenchman, by nature, is sensuous and sensitive. He has intelligence, which makes him tired of life sooner than other kinds of men. He is not athletic: he sees the futility of the pursuit of fame; the climate at times depresses him.

Anais Nin

#40. In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.

Theodor Herzl

#41. ...knew the futility of agonizing over why things had transpired as they had. What could have happened, did.

Raymond E. Feist

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. He arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life

Edith Wharton

#45. A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and the validity of the pursuit.

Jean Helion

#46. I saw finally the futility of all these gestures, that witchcraft is but a matter of focus-that one cann apply one's fierce and immeasurable energies to an act of choice.

Anne Rice

#47. The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.

Giacomo Leopardi

#48. 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

#49. Olivia watched him through a blur of tears, despising the futility of it. For there was nothing she could say to comfort a man whose family was long dead; there was no balm to heal wounds that scored a man's soul; and there was no way to make a man believe in the ties that bind.

Laura Lee Guhrke

#50. But then he'd lived long enough to understand the futility of expecting anything at all

Laura Barnett

#51. MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Ambrose Bierce

#52. Reverie by the open window in the sweet futility of a mild evening was yet to strike the Australian male as a requirement. (There would be the question of fly screens, for one thing.)

Shirley Hazzard

#53. The futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it

Jane Austen

#54. 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.

Michael Morpurgo

#55. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.

Daniel C. Dennett

#56. 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

#57. They spoke of age and decay. Of atrophy and ruin. Of the inevitability of loss and the futility of hope.

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#58. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory.

Steve Toltz

#59. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Kurt Vonnegut

#60. The end of the world revealed the futility of all commemorative plaques.

Tommy Wallach

#61. 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

#62. Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame.

Tom Rachman

#63. I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.

Henry Miller

#64. 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

#65. He would lose every game. And he still insisted on playing. I wondered at the futility of it. If it is the definition of insanity to repeat the same process and expect a different outcome, most of humanity must be insane.

Amie Kaufman

#66. Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake".

Paul David Tripp

#67. The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.

Albert Einstein

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.

Jon Krakauer

#71. Here you can easily understand the futility of ambitions and achievements, futility of success and failures, futility of wealth and possessions.

Girdhar Joshi

#72. 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

#73. Any change in customs ... takes generations to accomplish, and must come about by general consent. Even a superficial study of sociology shows the futility of past efforts to make a lasting change in manners by an act of will or authority.

Millicent Fenwick

#74. When we forgive, our emotions evolve and reveal the futility of carrying the baggage of anger, antipathy, hostility and hatred. We emerge out of those dark corridors of fear, angst and insecurity.

Balroop Singh

#75. 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

#76. ...rationality can easily unveil the futility of life and lead to depression - as the stereotype of the extremely smart, but world-weary, educated man (often portrayed as a detective, philosopher, or doctor) suggests. As such, the rational worldview has its limits.

Gudjon Bergmann

#77. To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.

John Howard Griffin

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. The author of the Mahabharata has not established the necessity of physical warfare; on the contrary he has proved its futility.

Mahatma Gandhi

#86. 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

#87. The acme of futility was to regret a pleasure that was past, and he had no intention of doing so.

Winston Graham

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.

Confucius

#93. Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

Michel Foucault

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

Errol Morris

#97. 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

#98. Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

Emile M. Cioran

#99. 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

#100. 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