#useless

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts. ↗

— Tobias Wolff

#meaning #uselessness #dreams

February 13, 1936 I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps... Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself. ↗

— Albert Camus

#despair #emotion #friendship #mistake #useless

The brain may die, but my compulsion for useless trivia lives on. ↗

— Molly Harper

#trivia #undead #useless-information #vampire-romance #information

High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless. ↗

— John Mayer

#end #fork #high #high school #in the end

As you can see, I have memorized this utterly useless piece of information long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You’ve taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations. ↗

— Bill Watterson

#taking-tests #useless-information #cynicism

Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile. ↗

— Abu Bakr

#futile #knowledge #useless #without

In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter? ↗

— Humphry Davy

#attempt #cause #chemical #electrical #energy

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners. ↗

— Mignon McLaughlin

#else #essential #everywhere #good #good manners

Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must accompany the stages of man's onward progress. The faculty of doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason. ↗

— Albert Pike

#comparison #discovery #divine #doubt #doubting

Worry is a useless mulling over of things we cannot change. ↗

— Peace Pilgrim

#change #over #things #useless #we cannot