#futility

Life ... is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#futility #hopelessness #life #life

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. ↗

— George Carlin

#been #dust #established #example #fact

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible. ↗

— Elliot Richardson

#bureaucratic #cruel #failure #futility #game

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. ↗

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

#because #cannot #catharsis #defeat #emotional

The wise hero must realise how terrible it will be, when all the wealth of this world lies waste, as now in various places throughout this middle-earth walls stand, blown by the wind covered with frost, the buildings storm-swept. The halls decay, their lords lie deprived of joy, the whole hearth-troop has fallen, proud by the wall. from THE WANDERER, lines 73-80 ↗

— Anonymous

#beautiful-writing #destruction #futility #haunting #middle-earth

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

— Errol Morris

#condemned #futility #ironic #past #remember

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 ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) ↗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

#life #numb #numbness #past-future #resignation

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

#faith #fear #futility #healing #religion

(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

#freedom #futility #mankind #freedom

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

#foolishness #futility #humanity #intelligence #knowledge