75 Futility Quotes

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

With drooping shoulders The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose.

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

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.

I'll tell you one thing: Don't ever give anybody your best advice, because they're not going to follow it.

Vain the ambition of kings Who seek by trophies and dead things To leave a living name behind, And weave but nets to catch the wind.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

Can storied urn, or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore... prove ultimately futile.

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a name - in the history of philosophy.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I understand his longing for immortality : Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter-productivity.

'Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.'

And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vise versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

It just seems so useless to have to work so hard and nothin' ever really seems to come from it.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

From reveries so airy, from the toil Of dropping buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up.

Golf is like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.

A person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking match.

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory.

The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless.

A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.

Like running hurdles. Work so hard, jump over every one, fast, high enough but no higher, because you can't afford to hang in the air. And then, when the race is over, you're dripping with sweat, either they beat you or you beat them...and then a couple of guys come out and move the hurdles out of the way. Turns out they were nothing. All that work to jump over them, but now they're gone

'Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!' Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'

'You're all just pissin' in the wind / You don't know it but you are.' - 'Ambulance Blues'

When you come to think of it, a blizzard is no use to anybody.

Nythod ddwyn, cyd nithud ddail, Ni'th dditia neb, ni'th etail, Na llu rhugl, na llaw rhaglaw, Na llafn glas na llif na glaw.

In the spight of his teeth.

All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.

Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know, Like a chicken with a fox, He couldn't win the war with ego. Give the kid the pick of pips, And give him all your stripes and ribbons. Now he's sitting in his hole, He might as well have buttons and bows.

Nam petere imperium quod inanus nec datur umquam, atque in eo semper durum sufferre laborem, hoc est adverso nixantem trudere monte saxa quod tamen e summo iam vertice rursum volvitur et plani raptim petit aequora campi.

In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.

The message seemed to be, you can't change anything and you'll end up dead so why try?

Drugs don't work. They don't even make you forget - only momentarily, because if something's that painful, nothing's going to make you forget it. You think they'll fill the hole, but the hole just gets deeper: It's like trying to fill in a hole without a spade.

Cover me, when I sleep Cover me, when I breathe You throw your pearls before the swine Make the monkey blind Cover me, darling please.

Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart's content, the fog won't lift.

Seem'd washing his hands with invisible soap In imperceptible water.

She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute.

Prier Dieu c'est se flatter qu'avec des paroles on changera toute la nature.

I often had the sharpest and harshest clashes with Hitler. But had I taken my own life, it wouldn't have improved things, because this demon went ahead with whatever he wanted and succeeded.

Ralph lay flat and looked up at the palm trees and the sky. 'Meetings. Don't we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk.' He got on one elbow. 'I bet if I blew the conch this minute, they'd come running. Then we'd be, you know, very solemn, and someone would say we ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was over they'd work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting.'

What is pride? A whizzing rocket That would emulate a star.

For Wits are treated just like Common Whores; First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doors.

He had been a shark trying to gnaw away at the shore, sharp-toothed and dangerous, yet unworthy of his adversary

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

And there's kids playing guns in the streets And one's pointing his tree branch at me So I put my hands up I say 'Enough is enough, If you walk away I walk away.' And he shot me dead.

Little soldier, little insect You know war it has no heart It will kill you in the sunshine Or happily in the the dark Where kindness is a card game Or a bent up cigarette In the trenches, in the hard rain With a bullet and a bet.

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.

Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the perform-ance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.

Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the world.

Gdyby w jeziorze byly ryby, wedkowanie nie mialoby sensu.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

'I can repeat the very words you were saying: 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.' Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor? You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'