Top 51 Life Futility Quotes
#1. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who'd discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer - life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading.
Philip Roth
#6. 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
#7. Tis but a day we sojourn here below,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe,
Then, leaving our life's riddles all unsolved,
And burdened with regrets, we have to go.
Omar Khayyam
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. In this hope, among the things we teach to the young are such truths as the transcendent value of the individual and the dignity of all people, the futility and stupidity of war, its destructiveness of life and its degradation of human values.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#11. The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.
Giacomo Leopardi
#12. Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.
Cormac McCarthy
#13. We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.
Steven Erikson
#14. Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.
Abba Eban
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.
This futility had let's call it a flavor.
Jonathan Franzen
#18. We are all guests on this earth. We come and we go. All of us. The oppressors and the oppressed, the weak and the strong. We are all here for a mere moment.
Jana Kotaishova
#19. 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
#20. Tears streamed down her wrinkled face. This world that she had longed to change for the better was as bad as the one into which she had been born. "An exercise in futility," she murmured.
Gary Inbinder
#21. My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.
Jo Walton
#23. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.
Jon Krakauer
#24. In all we do, and hear, and see,
Is restless Toil and Vanity.
While yet the rolling earth abides,
Men come and go like ocean tides
Anne Bronte
#25. ...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
#26. If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense but spring does not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#27. Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
Michel Foucault
#28. My life as a professional musician is a joyless exercise in futility.
Robert Fripp
#29. 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
#30. I have no more goals, all I'm gonna do is deal with the days Nature will give me along. I have lost too much strength on futile things until then !
Laure Lacornette
#31. 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
#32. The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion.
Thorstein Veblen
#33. With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#34. 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
#35. The prisoner's recurrent, sporadic dreams of escape were simply that - spurious vagaries dismissed almost as quickly as they blossomed in Schkirt's feverish mind.
Stanley Goldyn
#36. 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
#37. what I feel is that spending my life trying to earn the favor of an unseen, unknown, and unknowable being who watches me from the sky is an exercise in sheer futility.
Brandon Sanderson
#38. The humiliations and defeats,
given with a primitive honesty,
end not in frustration, despair or futility,
but in hunger, an ecstatic devouring hunger - for more life.
- Anais Nin
Anais Nin
#39. Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.
Isaac Asimov
#40. Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.
Isaac Asimov
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had known
how to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humble
surroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war
in
all the exalted elements of romance.
Joseph Conrad
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran
#48. I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.
Mary MacLane
#49. 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
#50. Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?
H. Rider Haggard
#51. The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.
Maya Angelou
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