Top 78 Quotes About Uselessness
#1. To compensate for this undercurrent of uselessness, we pretend we're all terribly important and that we have something to bring to the world.
Ruby Wax
#2. Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.
Georges Bataille
#3. The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.
Tom Robbins
#4. They were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.
Samuel R. Delany
#5. To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. She had never had a friend like this, in her private room, combing her hair, listening to her, talking about silly nonsense and the uselessness of one's parents; how the future was perfect, because they hadn't lived it yet.
Jessie Burton
#7. I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations - the sense of uselessness.
Patti Smith
#8. You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?" "No - " "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." I
Ursula K. Le Guin
#9. As a woman still,
without the right kind of mouth,
my tongue's of no use.
Kristen Henderson
#10. Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life.
Tryon Edwards
#11. The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt (171-172).
Alejo Carpentier
#12. Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.
William Ellery Channing
#13. Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress!
Ernest Renan
#14. We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.
Akhil Sharma
#16. It wasn't that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and so refocused my whole attention.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#17. Awake, my soul! Why should I give hours and days any longer to the vain world, when there is such a world of misery at my very door? Lord, put thine own strength in me; confirm every good resolution; forgive my past long life of uselessness and folly.
Andrew Bonar
#18. I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
William, Saroyan
#19. Huh."
"Huh what?"
"Would you look at this?" he asked, examining a small box. "It says it glows in the dark."
"So?"
"So, what use is that to anybody? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write her name in
the air with it?
Karen Chance
#20. The uselessness and expensiveness of modern women multiply bachelors.
Samuel Richardson
#22. But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.
Albert Camus
#23. What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
#24. My worth changes with every choice I make and every action I take. I can choose myself to uselessness or to being valuable.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
#25. The best sex of my life has officially wiped me out, every muscle a relaxed mess of orgasmy uselessness. He breathes hard, staring at me, then wipes his mouth and hops off the bed, walking bare assed out of the room.
Alessandra Torre
#26. Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties.
Henry Miller
#27. The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.
Maurice Blanchot
#28. The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he'd done the same.
Stewart O'Nan
#29. A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
Anthony Horowitz
#30. Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
Simone De Beauvoir
#31. Not only is history useless, but the historian should take pride in its uselessness.
James C. Malin
#32. Laziness is always your fault. It is the sign that a man has persevered in uselessness for too long.
Idries Shah
#33. Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.
Gerald Stern
#34. The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.
William Osler
#35. Keep your friends close, enemies closer. Takes little effort to drive a sharp knife through their hearts when they outlive their uselessness!
Akuku Mach Pep
#36. One. My tongue was at a new level of uselessness. Two. Oh my God, I'm really doing this. Three. OK, fuck it, let's dance.
Drew Barrymore
#37. It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
Douglas Adams
#38. Useless"-what they call you when you won't let yourself be used.
Marty Rubin
#39. Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.
Arthur Smith
#40. Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George Santayana
#41. Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.
Will Durant
#42. Both the young and the old are almost completely useless in our modern society, and are made keenly aware of that uselessness. They have no place. They are private, isolated - and hopeless.
Carl Rogers
#43. He expressed unconditional agreement with the uselessness and absurdity of the word 'fatherland'; he agreed with the idea that religion was harmful;33 but he loudly and firmly asserted that boots were inferior to Pushkin,34
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#44. To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#45. Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. The last day of the war provided chilling closure. The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm. The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it.
Joseph E. Persico
#47. Her father had once said that the poor might suffer poverty, but the rich had to contend with uselessness, and there was nothing like idleness to eat away at a person's soul.
Kate Morton
#49. The terrible lesson Burch taught me, impressed indelibly upon my mind the danger and uselessness of asserting I was a freeman. There was no possibility of any slave being able to assist me, while, on the other hand, there was a possibility of his exposing me.
Solomon Northup
#50. How can God give girls so much power ? How can they turn productive,busy and ambitious men into a wilting mass of uselessness. Page 204
Chetan Bhagat
#51. For a while, my self-control and my power of reason quailed to uselessness.
Kaoru Kurimoto
#52. He who cares to go to the trouble of demonstrating the uselessness of index numbers for monetary theory and the concrete tasks of monetary policy will be able to select a good proportion of his weapons from the writings of the very men who invented them.
Ludwig Von Mises
#53. . . .our whispered words, faintly in the darkness, dissolving
within the trees - then, fleeting words of consolation
would not suffice if feigned, and flippant words
confessed reluctance - our words
were meaningless uttered on the wind. . .
John Daniel Thieme
#54. He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total.
Curtis Ackie
#55. No man voluntarily expresses his opinion without some intent to make a difference, and even if he does, he shouldn't.
Criss Jami
#56. The idle wife ranked with the ornamentally wrought weapon and with the splendid offering to the gods as a measure of the man's power to waste, and therefore his superiority over other men ... As is the case with any other object of art, her uselessness is her use.
Emily James Smith Putnam
#57. Is there anything in the world more useless than an afterthought?
Marty Rubin
#58. Knowledge is something which you can use.
Belief is something which uses you.
Idries Shah
#59. All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!
Zhuangzi
#60. Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.
Lisa Unger
#61. The feeling of uselessness is no respecter of age and never asks permission, but instead corrodes people's souls, repeating over and over: 'No one is interested in you, you're nothing, the world doesn't need your presence.
Paulo Coelho
#62. The throbbing habits of assumption tinted with malice lead to decisions and actions that drum out faith, trust and respect towards a crashing carelessness and uselessness. Be effective by discarding sneaking suspicions.
Angelica Hopes
#63. Futility. Uselessness. Bloody entrophy. Death matters, at least sometimes.
Diana Gabaldon
#65. No one really belongs; at least not in this world. If there were a heaven, maybe there, but, even if there were, in it would be the souls who could bear witness to the undeniable cruelty of life, the poverty of the unwanted.
Kenneth Eade
#66. Evie wanted to cry. From fear. From exhaustion, yes. But mostly from the cruel uselessness, the damned stupid arbitrariness of it all.
Libba Bray
#67. When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness.
John O'Hara
#68. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.
George Orwell
#69. Auntie Wu took special pride in two of her accomplishments--the sons she bore and the flowers she grew. They were equally useless, but the flowers smelled better.
Kay Honeyman
#70. Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
#71. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
Eugene Ionesco
#73. Some things are so useless one can't live without them.
Marty Rubin
#74. So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. We know how easily the uselessness of almost every branch of knowledge may be proved to the complete satisfaction of those who do not possess it.
John Stuart Mill
#76. If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#77. Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.
Theophile Gautier
#78. In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by ... [philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
Plato
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top