Top 100 Quotes About Futility
#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. 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
#3. So what's on the agenda for tonight? (Danger)
Migraine, futility, possible death. Same as every night, I guess. (Alexion)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#4. Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
Erma Bombeck
#5. 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
#6. ...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
#7. And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.
Thomas Ligotti
#8. By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.
Michel Onfray
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. A woman I knew just drowned herself
The well was deep and muddy
She was just shaking off futility
Or punishing somebody
My friends were calling up all day yesterday
All emotions and abstractions
It seems we all live so close to that line
and so far from satisfaction
Joni Mitchell
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Man may be doomed to loss, sorrow, and desolation, but if he tries his strength and will, however briefly, upon the indifferent vast hostility of the elements, he rages against futility and asserts his right of being
Jim Perrin
#15. Here you can easily understand the futility of ambitions and achievements, futility of success and failures, futility of wealth and possessions.
Girdhar Joshi
#16. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.
Jon Krakauer
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility.
Zhuangzi
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake".
Paul David Tripp
#23. Thus pleasure itself, also becoming a right, lost its aggressive futility.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#24. Things have to be beautifully made, even if they are full of fun, fantasy and futility
Karl Lagerfeld
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.
Emil Cioran
#32. 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
#33. Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility.
Brendan I. Koerner
#34. Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame.
Tom Rachman
#35. 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
#36. Well, he thought, dwelling on past failures once you'd learned all there was to learn was just heaping futility on failure.
Raymond E. Feist
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.
Danny Elfman
#40. 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
#41. We will snatch purpose from the jaws of futility.
Andrew Hussie
#42. 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.
#43. Futility. Uselessness. Bloody entrophy. Death matters, at least sometimes.
Diana Gabaldon
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. The end of the world revealed the futility of all commemorative plaques.
Tommy Wallach
#48. Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
H.G.Wells
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. They spoke of age and decay. Of atrophy and ruin. Of the inevitability of loss and the futility of hope.
Stephen Lloyd Jones
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. 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
#59. The futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it
Jane Austen
#60. Macbeth's deed is done in horror, and without the faintest desire or sense of glory- done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand
A. C. Bradley
#61. Futility is in the eye of the beholder.
Dean Koontz
#62. It is humor's job to laugh at the futility oft engendered by the improbable; but it is poetry's job to dream of the potentiality of that which is not impossible.
D.E. Navarro
#63. There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again.
William Gibson
#64. 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
#65. You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility, and it's probably not even a good idea to try.
Robert Crumb
#66. 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
#67. Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.
Cormac McCarthy
#68. Sharing is the essence of teaching. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of civilization ... Without it, the imagination is but the echo of the self, trapped in a soundproof chamber, reverberating upon itself until it is spent in exhaustion or futility
Bill Moyers
#69. But then he'd lived long enough to understand the futility of expecting anything at all
Laura Barnett
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. It is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.
George Orwell
#74. 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
#75. The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.
Giacomo Leopardi
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and the validity of the pursuit.
Jean Helion
#82. 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
#83. How I hated the dark part of me that continually foretold of failure or futility.
Jeaniene Frost
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. ...knew the futility of agonizing over why things had transpired as they had. What could have happened, did.
Raymond E. Feist
#89. [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
#90. 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
#91. God created a good world that was subjected to futility because of the sinful, treasonous choice of the first human beings.
John Piper
#92. Hopelessness kills. Numerous studies in humans show that we can die as a result of dire beliefs and a sense of overwhelming futility.
Larry Dossey
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Accustomed as I am to public speaking, I know the futility of it.
Franklin P. Adams
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. So much adrenaline, emotion and futility hung in the air, throttling our bones, stirring our blood, making us starved, wild animals. Death made sex feel much more alive.
Karina Halle
#100. 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
