Quotes & Sayings About Futile Hope

If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. — Alan W. Watts

I hope martial artists are more interested in the root of martial arts and not the different decorative branches, flowers or leaves. It is futile to argue as to which leaf, which design of branches, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming. — Bruce Lee

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell ... — W.E.B. Du Bois

Some may call you crazy if you try to reason with a dog. It is with desperate attempts that you hope they understand you. When the realization sinks in that your futile pleading goes without understanding or care, you are left with no choice but to think of the next best thing. From Finally Home: Lessons on Life from a Free-Spirited Dog — Elizabeth Parker

Droll thing life is
that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself
that comes too late
a crop of inextinguishable regrets. — Joseph Conrad

The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man's individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown. — Samuel Smiles

The best you can hope for in a relationship is to find
someone whose flaws are the sort you don't mind. It is
futile to look for someone who has no flaws, or someone
who is capable of significant change; that sort of person
exists only in our imaginations. — Scott Adams

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance
that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see
unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death. — Alan W. Watts

One might be led to question whether the scientists acted wisely in presenting the statesmen of the world with this appalling problem. Actually there was no choice. Once basic knowledge is acquired, any attempt at preventing its fruition would be as futile as hoping to stop the earth from revolving around the sun. — Enrico Fermi

I will leave and isolate myself rather than go through the futile task of trying to make everyone happy, which is impossible anyway. — Donna Lynn Hope

Finding the happiness within is difficult but looking for happiness outside is futile. — Debasish Mridha

...A legendary leader distinguishes himself as someone who gets ahead of his people from an impasse and futile general consensus, and then finds new grounds that constitute the base from which a unique course of his people's destiny is charted... — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Even if it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is better to know and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we find comfortable. — Bertrand Russell

The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm. — George Gissing

In adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair - if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. Anything that excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically. — Christopher Hitchens

Live in hope. Because things do happen. Things do change. Worry really is futile. Don't fear the future. Dreams do come true. — Miranda Hart

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force? — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them. — Ma Jian

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. — Chris Hedges

I drifted off after a while, staring at the only star visible through the thick covering of leaves. Hope seemed a futile wish, but I troubled the lonely star to grant it anyway. — Richelle E. Goodrich

But when we are locked in a toxic relationship or community, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christlike in us; and a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence. Sometimes the bravest thing is to stop fighting for something that is never going to produce a winner. — Jen Hatmaker

She was making the case that we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile. I had just begun trying to make the case for hope in writing, and I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most. — Rebecca Solnit

Nobody really enjoys having to pacify their feelings. It's too much like failure; it reminds you of weakness. but feelings don't want to be pacified, either. They want to be fulfilled. You fulfill your positive feelings (love, hope, optimism, appreciation, approval) by connecting with other people, expressing your best self. You fulfill your negative feelings by releasing them. Your whole system recognizes negative feelings as toxic. It's futile to bottle them up, divert them, ignore them, or try to rise above them. Either negativity is leaving or it's hanging on - it has no other alternative.
As you fulfill emotions, your brain will change and form new patterns, which is the whole goal. — Deepak Chopra

O hope, most futile of futilities!
Thine iron summons comes again,
O inevadible Pain! — Francis Thompson