Words matter. These are the best Futility Quotes from famous people such as Geoff Dyer, Elliot Richardson, Robert Fripp, Tony Harrison, Michael Morpurgo, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.
There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
My life as a professional musician is a joyless exercise in futility.
There’s a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the ‘pity of war’ as Wilfred Owen called it.
So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It’s still their ball game. It’s their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director’s impulses.
It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility – a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
‘Black Hawk Down’ wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily.
The world, post-Katrina, was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn’t live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
God created a good world that was subjected to futility because of the sinful, treasonous choice of the first human beings.
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.
You can’t make everybody love you. It’s an exercise in futility, and it’s probably not even a good idea to try.
Change is the only constant, and to turn one’s back and pretend that it is not coming is an exercise in futility.
‘Sam Stone’ is a song about futility.
Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event – it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.
I used to tweet, but it’s an act of futility. You’re not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, ‘Oh my God!’ because you’ve opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers.
By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.
