You can’t argue with insanity. You can stare at it, gaping and incredulous, but arguing with it is futile.

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...

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...

Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.

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...

Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women...

To forget would mean the things we never knewhad never waited to be known, never waitedto be forgotten, had never been; waitingbeneath the long dead starsin time. . .

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I...

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic...

Nothing is more futile than looking for meaning in things that have none.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

futility.

In a thousand years or ten thousand, no one would remember my nation. It, too, would share in oblivion and prove to not matter, to never have mattered. The same for my species, and the...

Indeed if fish had fish-lore and Wise-fish, it is probable that the business of anglers would be very little hindered.

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...

But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what...

Joy, joy, joy!Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,And the future is dark, and the present is spread,Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.

It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.

Does anything we do ever end it?

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

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering...

Thoughts are phantoms. And when you fight with phantoms they always win.

All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of...

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

I have no more goals, all I’m gonna do is deal with the days Nature will give me along. I have lost too much strength on futile things until then !

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...

But how can anyone put a bridle on man’s vanity and arrogance? But how can Purity walk the earth without covering her feet with mud?

The time you absolutely have to get off your ass and act is when action seems futile

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

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

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...

Here you can easily understand the futility of ambitions and achievements, futility of success and failures, futility of wealth and possessions.

…futility is being sorry while doing nothing to remove the cause …

The more idealism proves futile, the more I respect idealists.

A Cathedral Façade at MidnightAlong the sculptures of the western wallI watched the moonlight creeping:It moved as if it hardly moved at allInch by inch thinly peepingRound on the pious figures of freestone, broughtAnd poised...

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...

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...

What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn’t it occur to you that the sort of...

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on...

You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.

Life … is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.

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;...

Don’t be carried away by beauty, for the faeces also stays in the rectum of ravishing faces, and their private life is not beautiful as their public life…fear beauty!

After we’re feasted down to white sticks and it’s all covered in lions and trees and whatever the monkeys become prod the ground with a toe, staring down with glittering eyes at the guts of...

I threw bitter tears at the ocean, but all that came back was the tide.

That’s like leaping off a precipice and trying to knit yourself a parachute on the way down.

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....

One might be led to question whether the scientists acted wisely in presenting the statesmen of the world with this appalling problem. Actually there was no choice. Once basic knowledge is acquired, any attempt at...

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...

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.