Futility Quotes - Page 8

• When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong.

  Edna Ferber

  War, Gun, Age

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• Any change in customs ... takes generations to accomplish, and must come about by general consent. Even a superficial study of sociology shows the futility of past efforts to make a lasting change in manners by an act of will or authority.

  Millicent Fenwick

  Past, Lasting Change, Effort

  Millicent Fenwick (1948). “Vogue's book of etiquette: a complete guide to traditional forms and modern usage”

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• This is a man with an old face, always old... There was pathos, in his face, and in his eyes. The early weariness; and sometimes tears in his eyes, Which he let slip unconsciously on his cheek, Or brushed away with an unconcerned hand. There were tears for human suffering, or for a glance Into the vast futility of life, Which he had seen from the first, being old When he was born.

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Eye, Men, Futility Of Life

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• The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair. Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts. This may be the vocation of man: to say "Amen" to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Heart, Men, Anchors

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1965). “Who is Man?”, p.80, Stanford University Press

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• I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Struggle, Creativity, Views

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• It's not like activist work is a nice add-on to what's really important, the spiritual work. The two are inseparable and it goes both ways. Many people are hardcore activists for decades, and they encounter burnout, futility, or a feeling of imbalance. Sometimes they need to go so far as to drop their activism and go on a spiritual journey. They're realizing that all the stuff they're trying to change in the world isn't just out there in the world. It's in them, too. And as long as they're blind to what's in them, they're going to continually re-create it in all that they do.

  Charles Eisenstein

  Spiritual, Nice, Journey

  Source: www.mindfulnessbell.org

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• I'm specifically referring to this certain feeling of sadness, fear, and helplessness that descended on me at the Mexico City protest a day or two after the Narvarte murders. Many of us have grown familiar with that feeling. Every few weeks or so it seems we're hit with some new crime or some new corruption scandal that isn't quite the same as a massacre, but that spawns a feeling of futility and despair in its own way.

  Francisco Goldman

  Sadness, Feelings, Despair

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Reality, Faces, Elements

  "Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice". Book by John Ashcroft, 2006.

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• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility

  Eric Hoffer

  Struggle, Shelter, Poverty

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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• I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I'm looking for outside of myself. It doesn't exist out there. Maybe it's only in here, inside my head. But my head is glass and my eyes have stopped being cameras, the tape has run out and nobody's words can touch me.

  David Wojnarowicz

  Running, Eye, Glasses

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• 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

  Lying, Men, Waiting

  Joseph Conrad (2010). “Lord Jim”, p.112, Bibliolis Books

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• Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case.: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Insecurity, Promise, Overcoming

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• The worst thing about depression isn't the sense that you're accentuating the negative, it's that you're seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It's the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.

  James Lileks

  Blow, Yawning, Wind

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• We need to reach the millions who live in cities, the hundreds of thousands in industrial centers, the tens of thousands in medium-sized towns, the thousands in small towns, and the hundreds in villages -- all these at once. Like a volcanic eruption, a spiritual revolution needs to spread through the country, to spur people to crucial decisions. People have to recognize the futility of splitting life up into politics, economics, the humanities, and religion. We must be awakened to a life in which all of these things are completely integrated.

  Eberhard Arnold

  Spiritual, Country, Cities

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• There is a mortal breed most full of futility. In contempt of what is at hand, they strain into the future, hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes.

  Pindar

  Ambition, Hunting, Hands

  Pindar (1942). “Some Odes of Pindar: In New English Versions”

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• More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
  I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.

  Woody Allen

  Men, Healthy, Despair

  Side Effects "My Speech to the Graduates" (1980)

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• In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Fashion, Play, Culture

  Jean Baudrillard (2016). “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, p.116, SAGE

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