Futility Of Death Quotes & Sayings

We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep. — Steven Erikson

What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death? — Francois Mauriac

So much adrenaline, emotion and futility hung in the air, throttling our bones, stirring our blood, making us starved, wild animals. Death made sex feel much more alive. — Karina Halle

(Man) fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring. We may smile at his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by making a long series of experiments, of which some were almost inevitably doomed to failure, that mane learned from experience the futility of some of his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments which have failed and which continue to be repeated merely because the operator is unaware of their failure. — James George Frazer

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In — Douglas Adams

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals. — Vincent Van Gogh

For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility. — James Carroll

If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense but spring does not. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Having lived among the owning classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages.
Yet, if you were poor and wretched, you had to care. Anyhow, it was becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care about money.
And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money? Nothing. — D.H. Lawrence

The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again. — R.D. Laing

Jenny and I once talked about how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are all going to die. What's the point of it all? Why bother getting up in the morning when faced with such futility? Or is it the promise of death that inspires life? That we must grab what we can while there's still time? Is it the not knowing if today is the day that keeps us going? But what if this is the day? What if the hour is here? How do you stand? How do you breathe? How do you go on? — Steven Rowley

Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? — Stanislaw Lem

Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread,
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue. — John Howard Griffin

I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either ... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle. — John Green

I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility. — Henry Miller

Well, I'll take these pages and move on. Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death. — Henry Miller

If you endeavor to achieve, it will happen given enough resolve. It may not be immediate, and often your greater dreams are something you will not achieve within your own lifetime. The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death. — Monty Oum

No matter what the storm clouds bring, you can face your pain with courage and hope. For two thousand years ago-six hours, one Friday-Christ firmly planted in bedrock three solid anchor points that we can all cling to. For the heart scarred with futility, that Friday holds purpose. For the life blackened with failure, that Friday holds forgiveness. And for the soul looking into the tunnel of death, that Friday holds deliverance. — Max Lucado

Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life - birth, death, self-deluding futility - go rushing to a teacher wise to the ways of the things that matter most. — Huston Smith

There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand. — Bertrand Russell

So what's on the agenda for tonight? (Danger)
Migraine, futility, possible death. Same as every night, I guess. (Alexion) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience. — Ian McEwan

I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year. — Helen Prejean

Futility. Uselessness. Bloody entrophy. Death matters, at least sometimes. — Diana Gabaldon

Tony's concern disintegrated. He could not understand C.J.'s determination to court death on a daily basis. Or maybe he did understand, and this was what caused his frustration. So many found the same solution his brother had. Selling death to their own people. The money was a difficult lure to resist. Additionally, the fear elicited from their hard core posturing proved nearly as addictive. They demanded to be heard, even though it didn't seem they had much to say. Perhaps the futility and smallness that characterized their lives was too overwhelming to articulate in any manner other than a primitive, incoherent scream. Maybe it was inevitable that those who felt they had no stake in society would opt to destroy it. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

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. — Stanley Hauerwas

When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi — Faiqa Mansab

How... how do I die?"
"In pain," he said. "Screaming... She said there was an enemy you had to fight. A creature of darkness. She said Skulduggery fought by your side for some of it, but... she sensed things more than she saw them, you know? She felt terror, and death, and futility. She felt the world on the edge of destruction, and she sensed evil. Unimaginable evil. — Derek Landy

Camus believes that in rejecting hope, rather than despair, the individual becomes that much closer to being free. It's in the acceptance of the futility of our actions online, even though they may provide both cause (validation, recognition) and value (enriching life via apps, etc.) there will be no change. Activity will continue. Inevitably, our relevancy or level of activity will falter, and eventually change. Camus uses the inevitability of death as cause and reason to eliminate hope. To eliminate hope lets the individual experience fully, without reservation and restriction, the life at hand. I could say the same about our modern condition. — Michael J. Seidlinger

The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. — Thomas Pynchon

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

I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard. — David Foster Wallace

They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have they ever given us in return for the trust, the love--They actually say 'love'--we're supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth. — Thomas Pynchon

Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton