Quotes about Futility

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.

They were such seriously futile people that she found herself wanting to cry out against their ready-made justifications for pointless lives.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Hell is having to execute a pointless act from which nothing ever comes except the need to do it again.

Among the tragedies of our time is humanity's pursuit of personal peace apart from God's enabling grace. That pursuit takes many forms: material, intellectual, social, even religious; but they all end in futility. When sinners find peace through God's grace, that is beautiful, that is cause for rejoicing! "Grace . . . and peace" is the proper Christian greeting and celebration (v. 2).

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

And both are gone. And ironically, I'm drawn to repeat my well known apothegm of futility: that, just as the person who wants praise will never be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And I therefore still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die. Fortunately, I've been able to get by very neatly without doing either.

Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.