Futility of Life Quotes

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

Life sucks, and then you die.

Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.’ You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is ‘success’, the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit.

There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

All is vanity, look you; and so the preacher is vanity too.

'Sam Stone' is a song about futility.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

Playing the game I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of futility of the human effort.

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.

To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?

When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)

[Man] ... his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

This is a man with an old face, always old... There was pathos, in his face, and in his eyes. The early weariness; and sometimes tears in his eyes, Which he let slip unconsciously on his cheek, Or brushed away with an unconcerned hand. There were tears for human suffering, or for a glance Into the vast futility of life, Which he had seen from the first, being old When he was born.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

Our pleasance here is all vain glory, This false world is but transitory.

What's the point? was my attitude. We're all just going to die and then NOT be let on the boat.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.