Quotes about Futility

So don't be dismayed when the wicked grow rich and their homes become ever more splendid. For when they die, they take nothing with them. Their wealth will not follow them into the grave.

Worrying was like sitting in a rocking chair—all that work and no progress.

The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.

If you cannot help worrying, remember that worrying cannot help you

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I...

It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence.

With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remarks the futility of themselves.

But all I know — the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself — these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

Surely every man walketh in a vain show: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.

Every man at his best state is altogether vanity.