Futilely Quotes & Sayings

The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse. — Joel Barlow

Credibility lasts about two cycles of bad material, and then you'll probably never get it back. If you let people down, that's really hard to come back from - harder than climbing from nothing to something, even. — Louis C.K.

There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet. — Koren Zailckas

When I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to make films. — Susanna White

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living. — William Nicholson

Good men gone unheard and bad men taking every advantage. — Alexandra Bracken

Farewell, my friend, Drizzt whispered, trying futilely to keep his voice from breaking. :This journey you make alone. — R.A. Salvatore

Those who can sit in a chair, undistracted for hours, mastering subjects and creating things will rule the world - while the rest of us frantically and futilely try to keep up with texts, tweets, and other incessant interruptions. — Arianna Huffington

Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match. — John Williams

I am a Christian - but sometimes I feel very removed from Christianity. The Jesus Christ that I believe in was the man who turned over the tables in the temple and threw the money-changers out - substitute T.V. evangelists if you like ... why in the West, do we spend so much money on extending the arms race instead of wiping out malaria, which could be eradicated given ten minutes worth of the world's arm budget? To me, we are living in the most un-Christian times. When I see these racketeers, the snake-oil salesmen on these right-winged television stations, asking for not your $20.00, or your $50.00, but your $100.00 in the name of Jesus Christ, I just want to throw up!! — Bono

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth. — M. Scott Peck

Depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [ ... ] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [ ... ] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [ ... ] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. — Jonathan Franzen

Who make not friends with sinful, lives not away from hope futilely,
Who outrages not another's wife and betrays not arrogance surely;
Who never commits any theft or never shows ingratitude certainly,
And never indulges in drinking is a person who is always happy.
[99] - 33 Mahatma Vidur — Munindra Misra

I vote Labour and can't begin to acknowledge anything good that comes from a Tory. — Paloma Faith

I wrestled futilely, then relaxed as a vine wrapped three times around my throat and squeezed.
Right," I choked out, and shut my eyes. "I'll wait here, then. — Rachel Caine

Whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog
and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes
telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate
(her words play up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)
then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent — Jean Toomer

The athlete who is building muscles though weight training should be very sure to work adequately on speed and flexibility at the same time. In combat, without the prior attributes, a strong man will be like the bull with its colossal strength futilely pursuing the matador or like a low-geared truck chasing a rabbit. — Bruce Lee

Nothing that's forced can ever be right, if it doesn't come naturally, leave it. — Al Stewart

Your eyes have died, but you see more than I. — Elton John

Stay out of this," she (Christy) snapped at me, wiping futilely at her cheeks. "This isn't your business."
"When you blamed Adam, whose only fault that I can see is that he has poor taste in wives, you made it my business," I told her.
Honey cleared her throat. "You do know you are one of his wives, right?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Happily, he doesn't know how bad off he is with me - and I intend that he never will. — Patricia Briggs

If I work hard enough, there will be things I can do tomorrow that I can't do today. — Randy Pausch

It's funny, how fast life changes. One minute you are present, and the next, you might find yourself futilely trying to get back to the world you were once part of. You might find yourself looking for people who can no longer hear you. You are in the world, but not of it. — Jodi Picoult

In love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely. — Marcel Proust

I was curious as to how my words started circulating at such an alarming rate. After all, every author waits to be discovered by someone. Anyone. And so I found myself smack bang in the middle of the mad hatters head, and as someone put it, Tumblr might actually be worse than that. But yes, futilely, I was attempting to discover the elusive origin of my words by tracing back notes until I came across my quote right next to a selfie of a stripper, or hooker, with a fox tail butt plug ... and that was when I stopped. — Dimitri Zaik

They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too full, ventilated it in hate or forgiveness. No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not cracked or broken, as others' were, but were bent into themselves; lost to others, they futilely sought to find themselves. — Soren Kierkegaard

Almost all people suffer some form of intense inner pain at some times in their lives. The suffering might be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts and it results from the battles we wage against our thoughts as we futilely try to get rid of our historie. — Steven C. Hayes

God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of humans are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with the quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!
And, now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works. — Frederic Bastiat

About a week earlier I had finished a book (on the Hell's Angels, scheduled this fall by Random House) and I felt that I needed about a week of total degeneration to cool out my system. To this end I went down to Big Sur and Monterery and filled my body with every variety of booze and drug available to modern man. For six or seven days I ran happily amok - spending money, sitting in baths, and futilely hunting wild boar with a .44 Magnum revolver. At one point I gave my car away to a man who paid $25 for the privilege of pushing it off a 400-foot cliff.
- to Max Scherr editor, Berkley Barb 7/20/1966 — Hunter S. Thompson

The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. - THOMAS JEFFERSON — Richard Dawkins

The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant. — Mario Batali

Ever since going up to university, I have accumulated new debt, and new means of becoming indebted. — Michael Gove

She had grown to accept unpleasantness as a part of life rather than to struggle futilely against truths that could not be changed. — Terry Brooks

As the thing came closer, what was left of Nick's body became revealed and I could see how the dead boy's eyes had bled from the trauma inflicted upon him; they dripped with steady succession onto the floor between his splayed legs. He looked like a rejected marionette tossed haphazardly in the corner by a frustrated puppeteer, his head drooping so low that his chin rested against his chest. His motionless arms lay at his sides, both of them squeezed into tight fists, as if he'd died futilely trying to defend himself. — J. Tonzelli

Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money?
I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all. — Oscar Wilde