40 Quotes On Futility

Life's journey often forces us to confront moments where our efforts seem meaningless, and our pursuits appear void of purpose. It's in these poignant instances that quotes on futility resonate deeply, offering solace, reflection, and sometimes, a touch of humor. Whether it's the quiet resignation in the face of impenetrable obstacles or the ironic recognition of life's inherent uncertainties, insights from great thinkers and writers have captured the essence of futility eloquently. In this collection, we've curated forty profound quotes that not only highlight the inevitability of such moments but also provide a lens through which to understand and perhaps even appreciate the absurdity of it all.

1. “Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.” - Haruki Murakami

2. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” - Henry David Thoreau

3. “...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE” - Kurt Vonnegut

4. “If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.” - Kurt Vonnegut

5. “He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.''All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.''What's so negative about it?' I said.'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.'"Ignorance,"' I said.” - Kurt Vonnegut

6. “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

7. “(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute” - Bruce Sterling

8. “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

9. “Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.” - P.D. James

10. “[…] 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

11. “How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.” - Erich Maria Remarque

12. “The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.” - Confucius

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

14. “Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.” - Michael Chabon

15. “I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?” - Arthur Conan Doyle

16. “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

17. “For many, the search for Jesus is initiated from experiencing an event in life so powerful, it awakens the dragons of faith; from pain so deep, it calls on the hidden fears of the soul in an effort to survive. For others it means a serious personal life survey that ultimately forces the confrontation with the futility, anesthetics, and despair in their lives.” - W. Scott Lineberry

18. “Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?” - Stanisław Lem

19. “With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If only the significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be he history of its successive regrets and its impotences.” - Albert Camus

20. “Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.” - Derek Landy

21. “Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?” - H. Rider Haggard

22. “Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.” - H. Rider Haggard

23. “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

24. “Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?” - theodor w. adorno

25. “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

26. “Człowiek jest zły i cała jego działalność polega na robieniu niepotrzebnych rzeczy i gromadzeniu niepotrzebnej wiedzy.” - Kurt Vonnegut

27. “Na początku Bóg stworzył Ziemię i oglądał ją z wyżyn swojej kosmicznej samotności. I rzekł Pan: Ulepmy z gliny żywe stworzenia, aby glina mogła zobaczyć, co uczyniliśmy. I ulepił Bóg wszelkie zwierzęta, jakie żyją na Ziemi, a pośród nich i człowieka. Jedynie glina w postaci człowieka potrafiła mówić. Bóg pochylił się nisko, kiedy glina w postaci człowieka powstała, rozejrzała się dokoła i przemówiła. Człowiek zamrugał i grzecznie spytał: Jaki jest sens tego wszystkiego? - Czy wszystko musi mieć jakiś sens? - spytał Bóg. - Oczywiście - odpowiedział człowiek. - W takim razie pozostawiam tobie znalezienie sensu tego wszystkiego - powiedział Bóg. I odszedł.” - Kurt Vonnegut

28. “The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.” - Joseph Conrad

29. “I resolved to break the barren soil of my fruitless brain.” - Elizabeth Grymeston

30. “...futility is being sorry while doing nothing to remove the cause ...” - John Geddes

31. “I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)” - Cornell Woolrich

32. “Patronage of NegationI am constantly confronted by other people’s worksThat I could have created myself.And I am constantly disappointed by them.Sadly, I have to recognize themFor what they are: inferior versionsOf what I could have doneIf I’d been insecure enough in my abilitiesTo do anything.” - John Tottenham

33. “My Sadness is Deeper than YoursMy sadness is deeper than yours. My interior life is richer than yours. I am more interesting than you. I don’t care about anybody else’s problems. They are not as serious as mine. Nobody knows the weight I carry, the trouble I’ve seen. There are worlds in my head that nobody has access to: fortunately for them, fortunately for me. I have seen things that you will never see, and I have feelings that you are incapable of feeling, that you would never allow yourself to feel, because you lack the capacity and the curiosity. Once you felt the hint of such a feeling, you would stamp it out. I am a martyr to futility and I don’t expect to be shut down by a pretender. Mothballs are an aphrodisiac to me, beauty depresses me. You could never hope to fathom the depth of my feelings, deeper than death. I look down upon you all from my lofty height of lowliness. The fullness of your satisfaction lacks the cadaverous purity of my pain. Don’t talk to me about failure. You don’t know the meaning of the word. When it comes to failure, you’re strictly an amateur. Bush league stuff. I’m ten times the failure you’ll ever be. I have more to complain about than you, and regrets: more than a few, too many to mention. I am a fully-qualified failure, I have proven it over and over again. My credentials are impeccable, my resume flawless. I have worked hard to put myself in a position of unassailable wretchedness, and I demand to be respected for it. I expect to be rewarded for a struggle that produced nothing. I want the neglect, the lack of acknowledgment. And I want the bitterness that comes with it too.” - John Tottenham

34. “That's like leaping off a precipice and trying to knit yourself a parachute on the way down.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

35. “You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

36. “It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.” - Dejan Stojanovic

37. “It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

38. “Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.” - Ian McEwan

39. “You can't argue with insanity. You can stare at it, gaping and incredulous, but arguing with it is futile.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

40. “Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.” - Vera Nazarian