Quotes About Futility

#1. But how can anyone put a bridle on man's vanity and arrogance? But how can Purity walk the earth without covering her feet with mud?

Nikos Kazantzakis

#2. My life as a professional musician is a joyless exercise in futility.

Robert Fripp

#3. 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

#4. I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility.

Michael Chabon

#5. 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

#6. The ultimate in futility is owning important jewelry. Insurers often insist on the wearing of paste replicas because necks with real rocks around 'em risk wringing.

Malcolm Forbes

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Laura Barnett

#11. How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.

Anne Waldman

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Beth Moore

#15. 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

#16. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

W.B.Yeats

#17. But the question drowns in it's futility
And even I have got to laugh at me

Emily Saliers

#18. 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

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

Mahatma Gandhi

#20. [ ... ] as if the next thing must quickly come along to occupy her, or the abyss might open. What abyss? The abyss that waits for all of us, when all our actions seem futile, when the ability to fill the day seems stalled, and the waiting takes on an edge of dread.

Anita Brookner

#21. That's like leaping off a precipice and trying to knit yourself a parachute on the way down.

Kelli Jae Baeli

#22. What is hope but futility for moments stood on end.

Sydney Lee

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. He is a cat, Miss Lancaster. Asking him such questions is an exercise in futility.

Jim Butcher

#27. 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

#28. The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

Paul Russell

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

Winston Graham

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

Jacques Barzun

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

Philip Roth

#41. 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

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

Franklin P. Adams

#43. 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

#44. Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.

Patrick White

#45. If. A two-letter word for futility.

Sidney Sheldon

#46. 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

#47. The fatal futility of Fact.

Henry James

#48. 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

#49. The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.

Glen Duncan

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

Confucius

#51. One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.

Steven Pinker

#52. If you endeavor to achieve, it will happen given enough resolve. It may not be immediate, and often your greater dreams are something you will not achieve within your own lifetime. The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death.

Monty Oum

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

Isaac Asimov

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

Michel Foucault

#55. Change is the only constant, and to turn one's back and pretend that it is not coming is an exercise in futility.

Anthony Carmona

#56. 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

#57. Promoting health without encouraging others to seek wholeness is an exercise in futility. Not until we realize that our bodies are mirrors of our interpersonal, spiritual, professional, sexual, creative, financial, environmental, mental, and emotional health will we truly heal.

Lissa Rankin

#58. Nothing is more futile than looking for meaning in things that have none.

Marty Rubin

#59. 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

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

Cullen Hightower

#61. I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. a

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#62. 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

#63. Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.

Iain Pears

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. And did not believe in His wondrous works. 33Therefore their days He consumed in futility,

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

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

Errol Morris

#71. Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

Ian McEwan

#72. 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

#73. Healey's First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.

Denis Healey

#74. Voting is actually an exercise in futility and only used to convey false credibility to a controlled political system totally divorced from the people

Ron Holland

#75. He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer took pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they proposed to him in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: What is the use?

Victor Hugo

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Karma means always wanting more of what won't get you anywhere in the first place.

Deepak Chopra

#79. The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Emile M. Cioran

#81. Futility has become a great subject, full of opportunities.

Mason Cooley

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. What is technology in the end but man's futile effort to create the world in his own image?

Marty Rubin

#86. 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

#87. I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.

Mary MacLane

#88. Danny curses up a storm. And feels stupid. Because cursing in front of company at least generates an effect. Cursing alone is like taking a Hi-Liter to futility.

David Levithan

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. Prayer is futility when compared to belief.

James Cook

#92. 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

#93. In your action, you lose sight of the vision, you lose sight of your trust in the process, and you just bang around in a sense of futility. Hold the vision and trust that the Universe will acclimate to your vision. Hold the vision and trust the process.

Esther Hicks

#94. ... murder wol out

Geoffrey Chaucer

#95. I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?

Arthur Conan Doyle

#96. 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

#97. ( ... ) a Universe composed of one-trillionth part matter to one decillion parts black velvet futility.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Jack Kerouac

#99. The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my futility. If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth!" But our realities are what has brought us together. We're beaten brothers in arms.

Henry James

#100. 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