Futile Pursuit Quotes

Even if you win the rat-race, you’re still a rat.

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

I've definitely had the experience where I was pursuing someone for a long time that I just obviously did not connect with, so I was always, kind of altering myself for her, But then you realize it's just not worth it. What's the point?

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

I told Tantalus to go chase a doughnut.

If you have an impossible dream, a dream that cannot be fulfilled, the friendly thing for me to do is to put a stop to you wasting your life at it.

When you're obsessive, like me, searching for something unattainable can become unhealthy... it's like falling through the air and grabbing at the clouds.

The largest ambition has the least appearance of ambition when it meets with an absolute impossibility in compassing its object.

O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.

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?

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.

I gave up years ago on the concept that you could actually have balance in your life, I think it's a phantom chase.

It is odd to watch with what feverish ardour Americans pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they might not have chosen the shortest route to get it. They cleave to the things of this world as if assured they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they expected to stop living before relishing them. Death steps in, in the end, and stops them, before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he had toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some unheard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love.

Plough not the seas, sow not the sands,Leave off your idle pain;Seek other mistress for your minds,Love's service is in vain.

There's something bizarrely funny about a guy who doesn't realise he's, in essence, a dog chasing his own tail.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;Round and round they sped.I was disturbed at this;I accosted the man."It is futile," I said,"You can never-""You lie," he cried,And ran on.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

Scare answers to scare, and force begets force, until at length it comes to be seen that we are racing one against another after a phantom security which continually vanishes as we approach.

You can never reach the promised land. You can march towards it.

When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They're gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.