Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

'Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?

None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.

You've got to stop whipping a dead horse sometime.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.

If you can do it then why do it?

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

I fought for years and spent a fortune fighting and never got anywhere.

I'm pretty aware that the pursuit of perfection is, inherently, a flawed concept.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results when, in fact, the results never change, is one definition of insanity. That goes for economics, too.

Sisyphus, you know, had an easy life.

There is something inherently foolish in soldiering on when there is no hope of payoff.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

Living's heavy work, but off to one side the way we are, it's useless, too. It don't make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.

Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word, too.

It is useless attacking the insensible.

The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.

There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.