Futility Quotes

you must not use wood to put out the fire.

— Bette Lord

“Does anything we do ever end it?”

— Lance Charnes

I gave up before birth.

— Samuel Beckett

All work is empty save when there is love.

— Khalil Gibran

Prayer is futility when compared to belief.

— James Cook

“Futility is in the eye of the beholder.”

— Dean Koontz

If. A two-letter word for futility.

— Sidney Sheldon

The fatal futility of Fact.

— Henry James

“Healey’s First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.”

— Denis Healey

“The nobility of age is that it conceals from the young the futility of effort.”

— Yeo-tze

The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.

— Maya Angelou

Defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom, and above all futility.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame.”

— Tom Rachman

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

— Emile M. Cioran

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

— Dejan Stojanovic

All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility.

— Zhuangzi

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

— Errol Morris

The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death.

— Monty Oum

“In all we do, and hear, and see, Is restless Toil and Vanity. While yet the rolling earth abides, Men come and…

— Anne Brontë

Once you see what you are doing or have been doing, you also see its futility, and that unconscious pattern then comes…

— Eckhart Tolle

God created a good world that was subjected to futility because of the sinful, treasonous choice of the first human beings.

— John Piper

Possibly the only thing we Notekillers place on a higher pedestal than music is laughs, so, of course, we also know that…

— David First

“If you're a sailor, best not know how to swim. Swimming only prolongs the inevitable—if the sea wants you and your time…

— James Clavell

“I have no more goals, all I'm gonna do is deal with the days Nature will give me along. I have lost…

— Laure Lacornette

“A man votes for one party and remains miserable; he concludes that it was the other party that would bring the millennium.…

— Bertrand Russell

To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom…

— Sri Aurobindo

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted…

— Kurt Vonnegut

In Zen Buddhism, "The Great Cessation" is a term that points to the abandoning of the effort to define one's self by…

— Mike Scheidt

“Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers…

— Patrick White

While Leonidas was preparing to make his stand, a Persian envoy arrived. The envoy explained to Leonidas the futility of trying to…

— Plutarch

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming…

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live...They won't become involved in…

— Shirley Chisholm

“It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of…

— Thomas Ligotti

Worms'-Meat, n. The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and…

— Ambrose Bierce

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the…

— Vincent Van Gogh

Sure, nothing succeeds like success. Fact is, dearest, we are fools. We cling to an ideal no one wants or cares about.…

— Emma Goldman

...boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your…

— Joseph Brodsky

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to…

— Spider Robinson

When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it…

— Edna Ferber