Aimless Quotes & Sayings

When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen. — Alan W. Watts

Think only of what you desire, and expect only what you desire, even when the very contrary seems to be coming into your life. Make it a point to have definite results in mind at all times. Permit no thinking to be aimless. Every aimless thought is time and energy wasted, while every thought that is inspired with a definite aim will help to realize that aim, and if all your thoughts are inspired with a definite aim, the whole power of your mind will be for you and will work with you in realizing what you have in view. That you should succeed is therefore assured, because there is enough power in your mind to realize your ambitions, provided all of that power is used in working for your ambitions. — Christian D. Larson

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit ... — Hippocrates

We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in yourself to continue living. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness. — Anna Quindlen

If one wants to go to Mumbai from Baroda, he will 'like' all the signs towards the south. And if he wants to go to Delhi, he will like all the signs towards the north. One can tell what path he is on from what he 'likes'. There are many paths, not just one. As many minds as there are, there are that many ways and they are all intellect-based opinions. Where one is guided by the intellectual opinions, there is nothing but aimless wandering there. Only the opinions of the Vitaraag Lords (the enlightened ones) is a "safe side"! — Dada Bhagwan

When someone's lost, aimless and adrift
Take the time, give 'em a lift
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery
But today, you can be their gift. — Squire Rushnell

An objective is an ambition, and life without ambition is ... well, aimless wandering. — Alfred Wainwright

They aimless halt, who halt for others. — Swami Vivekananda

But that's the Way, and there is no other. And once his mind's made up, the trembling and aimless walking stops, and he can look doom in the face without flinching. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

I always felt that the problems of the world would never ever be solved until people came to terms with the deeper issues [spiritual] - that there would be an aimless reshuffling of world leaders and governments and programs. — Woody Allen

Aimless life leads to depression — Sunday Adelaja

Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless. — Mahmoud Darwish

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home? — Albert Camus

If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. — Marcus Aurelius

We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can't afford to leave home and can't get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature. — Jane Ridley

Among the aimless, unsuccessful or worthless, you often hear talk about 'killing time.' The man who is always killing time is really killing his own chances in life. While the man who is destined to success is the man who makes time live by making it useful. — Arthur Brisbane

Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ... she knew there was nothing to fear. — Toni Morrison

The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion. — John W. Gardner

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party - all these may also impose a simple structure on life. — Alvin Toffler

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations. — E. M. Forster

And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking. — Catherynne M Valente

Westcliff looked affronted. "Are you telling me in earnest that you are considering giving up your employment, your ambitions, your future ... in favor of traveling the earth in a vardo?"
"Yes. I'm considering it."
Westcliff's coffee-colored eyes narrowed. "And you think after years of living a productive life in London that you would adjust happily to an existence of aimless wandering?"
"It's the life I was meant for. In your world, I'm nothing but a novelty."
"A damned successful novelty. And you have the opportunity to be a representative for your people - "
"God help me." Cam had begun to laugh helplessly. "If it ever comes to that, I should be shot. — Lisa Kleypas

He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me. — Heidi Julavits

It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking. — H.G.Wells

We're all drifters here, embarked on an aimless journey — Marty Rubin

Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. — Albert Camus

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty. — Edith Wharton

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it. — Jean Baudrillard

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

For me, faith means that what is right will win out one day. It means that the universe is not aimless but moves by some positive design. — Sarah Ferguson

One foot in front of the other, more aimless than direct, Bradford left the waiting room for the outside world. Called for a taxi and then dialed Munroe again, desperate for her voice, for one ray of light in the darkness, afraid of what he might say if she did answer, afraid of himself and the inner deadening that pointed to a danger far more lethal than any rage he'd felt. — Taylor Stevens

The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage. — Wyndham Lewis

Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
- from Thing Language — Jack Spicer

America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive. — John W. Gardner

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life. — Margaret Atwood

Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait - for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ... — Jean Rhys

There is nothing so unpardonable as to consent to a senseless, aimless and purposeless life. Helen Keller — Robin S. Sharma

Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we'll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay. — Jess C. Scott

Without vision, a church devolves into a lukewarm, aimless organization characterized by infighting, budget grabbing and a dead heart for the lost. — Todd Stocker

An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats. — Paul Theroux

I would have told them that he lived a life lacking in purpose or direction. Like those aimless rides I took him on. A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by. An indifferent life. — Khaled Hosseini

The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen. — Eugen Herrigel

Everything in a movie completed. Relationships began, they developed and they ended or went on happily forever. All in less than two hours. Life, though, was not like a movie, it was ragged, an outdated map with new streets added whose direction you could never quite discern, or a maze filled with suddenly appearing walls and aimless corridors. Even when a movie didn't have a happy ending, it had a logical ending that you could live with. Life had endings that you didn't know were endings, or endings that thought were endings and then they weren't. — Marshall Thornton

I Loved Him

I loved how his eyes danced merrily,
and the gentle way he spoke;
the way he filled my aimless days,
with bitterness and hope.
I loved him as I fell to sleep,
and each morning as I woke;
I loved him with all my wayward heart -
until the day it broke. — Lang Leav

In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,
no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on,
so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ellipse is as aimless as that,
Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear
In our present. Its flexing is its account,
Return to the point of no return. — John Ashbery

without music he felt aimless and adrift. — Nicholas Sparks

All sens of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story, they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond intercepting the odd squirt of sperm that would otherwise have troubled a respectable wife, she might as well be dead. Yet, she exists, and, against the odds, she is happy. — Michel Faber

A million miles from nowhere, is better than going nowhere, a million times. — Anthony Liccione

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun our gradual descent into the Indianapolis area, a descent similar in many ways to the gradual slide of the United States from a first-class world leader to an aggressive, third-rate debtor nation of overweight slobs, undereducated slob children and aimless elderly people who can't afford to buy medicine. — George Carlin

Man does not drift into goodness ... the chance port of an aimless voyage. He must fight ever for his destination. — William George Jordan

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end. — Alan Watts

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The white people were as thick and numerous and aimless as grasshoppers, moving always in a hurry but never seeming to get to whatever place it was they were going to. — Dee Brown

Even aimless journeys have a purpose ... — Tony Horwitz

It had the tangled floor plan common to all hospitals, seemingly designed by someone who believed in the healing power of watching confused visitors aimlessly wander around hallways. — David Wong

I'm sure he doesn't see it as aimless. We all have different goals. His are achievable. — Colin Cotterill

Prayer is powerful, but if our prayers are aimless, meaningless, and mingled with doubt, they will be of little hope to us. — Billy Graham

But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was. — Aspen Matis

A perfect piece of architecture kindles that aimless reverie, which bears the soul we know not whither. — Madame De Stael

Like a fierce wind roaring high up in the bare branches of trees, a wave of passion came over me, aimless but surging ... I suppose it's lust, but it's awful and holy like thunder and lightning and the wind. — Marion Milner

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric ... — Thomas Huxley

[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment. — Janet Malcolm

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. — H.G.Wells

For some, the life journey has just started, for some, it is about to end; but in truth, there is no start and there is no end! There is just an ocean of particles playing aimlessly! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you. — Susan Minot

The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. — Robert Gottlieb

Without a goal analytics is aimless and worthless. — Michael Porter

To speculate without facts is to attempt to enter a house of which one has not the key, by wandering aimlessly round and round, searching the walls and now and then peeping through the windows. Facts are the key. — Julian Huxley

i took a night drive.
i needed to get away.
i needed to know
it's okay to go
and have no destination,
where time moves slow
or doesn't exist.
that life can be like this,
aimless wandering,
just breathing,
living,
driving forever underneath the stars. — AVA.

One who gossips usually carries boredom in one hand and bitterness in the other. — Suzy Kassem

It's funny how aimless a person can feel at times, even when they know God is in control. — Chris Fabry

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear — Marilynne Robinson

Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration. — Don DeLillo

With no navigational skills, her travels became aimless, and after several days she began to experience excruciating hunger, as she had not the foresight to pack food before she set out. She drifted through tiny villages and saw juicy fruits and vegetables growing in the gardens of the peasants, but could not bring herself to beg for food or attempt to steal it. She ate small beetles and grasshoppers, since she had no hunting skills. She chewed on the bitter roots of sassafras trees, which turned her stomach sour but provided a small amount of nourishment. How — Brian Edwards

Wandering down the street in an aimless sort of way, cold too, in a dress from last night that made young men stop and stare in the street, Charity Hill found herself hating the single life for the very first time. — Elizabeth Jane Howard

It is easy for the believer to observe God's mandate through the axis of time by the relinquishment of all ancient human ideas. The resurrection thereof can only be called for by the Aryan reincarnate spirit that demands a [cycle of existence leading to liberation through aimless drifting, wandering and mundane existence] - modeling thereby the spirit of the fauna; as in the case of Judah. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

My take on the indigent is that some are there because of temporary setbacks, some by default, and some for lack of an alternative. Some are needy, some are off their meds, some have opted out, some have been ousted from facilities where they might be better served. Many are there for life and not always by personal choice. Alcoholic, addicted, aimless, illiterate, unmotivated, unskilled, or otherwise unable to prosper, they sink to the bottom, and if they're down for any length of time, they lose the capacity to climb back out of the hole into which they've fallen. If there's a remedy, I don't know what it is. From what I've seen of the problem, most solutions perpetuate the status quo. — Sue Grafton

Finn drifted around, rootless and aimless as dandelion fluff in the wind. — Laura Ruby

If I have a last wish, I want to remember you. In an aimless life, to not even have those memories would be hell. — Lee Hyung-chul

I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can't do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness ... and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK. — Helen DeWitt

There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human. — Henry Miller

The Spaniards have been reduced to aiming aimless balls into the box. — Ron Atkinson

I know from your letters and from seeing you after your play that you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that's okay that's alright because we're all meant to be like that at twenty-four. In fact our whole generation is like that. I read an article about it, it's because we never fought in a war or watched too much television or something. — David Nicholls

For a time, I was quite literally at loss as to what to do with myself. For more than half a century I had looked after Suleiman.My daily existence had been shaped by his needs, his companionship. Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift. — Khaled Hosseini

Though logic-choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy ... — William Butler Yeats

Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time. — Kobo Abe

She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.
You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you. — Jean Rhys

Aimless drifting also fulfills an intention. — Mason Cooley

Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency. — Isaac Asimov

His thoughts became as scattered and aimless as the rivulets sluicing down her lush curves. She was a goddess rising from the water. Like Botticelli's Birth of Venus, except with heavy silvery hair darkened by her bath that, unlike Venus, she didn't use to hide her feminine secrets. She stood with her chin held at an obstinate angle, her shoulders straight in an observance of good posture, those soft gray eyes staring at him with a mixture of resolution and expectation. — Kerrigan Byrne

Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can. — Don DeLillo

People need external activity because they have no internal activity ... [Hence] the restlessness of those who have nothing to do, and their aimless traveling. What drives them from country to country is the same boredom which at home drives them together into such crowds and heaps it is funny to see. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I was going to say he's aimless," the witch replied. "I know he's a bit old to be old to living at home with his mom, but he's had a difficult time holding a job. He's worked at Wendy's, Taco Bell, and Burger King, but it all ends the same way- he challenges his manager to combat, takes over the restaurant, and enslaves his coworkers. Then it's back to video games." - Morgan le Fay — Michael Buckley

Most men lead lives of aimless distraction. — Rick Warren

I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by. — Timothy Hallinan

Some people aim at nothing in life and hit it with amazing accuracy. — Aman Jassal

His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn't got anything to say yet and shut it again. His brain then started to contend with the problem of what his eyes told it they were looking at, but in doing so relinquished control of the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control of his left hand which then wandered around in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and simultaneously tried to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground. — Douglas Adams