Pointless Work Quotes & Sayings

It had been four years. Four years ago, the return home had been to take care of paperwork related to the family registry when I got married. When I thought back on it, what a pointless trip! I thought it was all paperwork. The problem was that nobody else thought it. It comes down to the different ways in which minds work. What's over for one person isn't over for another. But the path splits in two different directions, and so you end up apart.
From that point on there was no hometown for me. Nowhere to return to. What a relief! No one to want me, no one to want anything from me. — Haruki Murakami

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life. — Wendell Berry

[..] a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don't serve the god of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, pervers work and gets paid - even paid well - for it. — Maggie Nelson

It really doesn't work for you if it has no meaning?" "Biologically, anything would work. Pussy is pussy," he stated baldly. "You drive your dick into it, close your eyes, you'll get off. But sex isn't about that. It shouldn't be about that for anybody. It doesn't have to be about emotion, but it has to be about something. If I don't respect the woman attached to the pussy I'm fucking, can't look in her eyes and be all about that with her, not just all about the moment I get off, it's pointless. And there's no point to doing something pointless. — Kristen Ashley

Not a single thought managed to take shape in her mind: for the likeness of this day to the last seemed to her the clearest proof that it would be another quite useless day, a day she would gladly have done without. For a moment she thought that a day like this would be pointless for anyone on earth, then abruptly changed her mind as she realised that thousands of women, after a hard week's work, or a family quarrel, or even just after catching a cold, would envy her just for having the leisure to rest in comfort. — Ismail Kadare

Winslow bounced over on the balls of his feet, clearly not experiencing any sort of crash. 'Aren't your guys nervous? I'm nervous as all hell.'
'There's nothing to be nervous about,' Beck said, joining them. 'Nerves are only useful when they can spur you on to work harder, faster, better. Once the work is done, they become pointless. — Louisa Edwards

What you do is ultimately pointless. You could be replaced any day of the week with the first moron who walks in the door. So work as little as possible, and spend a little time (not too much, though) 'selling yourself' and 'networking' so that you will have backup and will be untouchable (and untouched) the next time the company is restructured. — Corinne Maier

This is not what I had in mind," she muttered to Bill,who was hovering,always,on the rim of the cupboard next to her washtub. She still wasn't used to being the only one in the kitchen who could see him. It made her nervous every time he hovered over other members of the staff,making dirty jokes that only Luce could hear and no one-besides Bill-ever laughed at.
"You children of the millenium have absolutely no work ethic," he said. "Keep your voice down,by the way."
Luce unclenched her jaw. "If scrubbing this disgusting soup tureen had anything to do with understanding my past, my work ethic would make your head spin. But this is pointless." She waved a cast iron skillet in Bill's face.Its handle was slick with pork grease. "Not to mention nauseating. — Lauren Kate

I like to use my hands and make things ... It might seem pretty stupid or pointless but that doesn't matter ... some of the most interesting work is the stuff that starts like that - out of a raw need for activity. — Bruce Nauman

The task of these emerging churches, they contend, is one of "dismantling first and then...rebuilding." They realize that this makes the traditional church uneasy. But, the add, the rebuilding stage cannot be rushed. The work of undoing is essential. "What to some may appear to be pointless complaining is part of a larger process of dismantling ideas of church that simply are not viable in postmodern culture. The emerging church even calls the church to deconstruct itself before it reconstructs itself for ministry in a postmodern climate. — Jim Belcher

Life Without Work
To do nothing
In this day and age,
When so much pointless work
Is being produced,
Could almost be considered an achievement.
It all compares most unfavorably
With my own imaginary
Body of work. — John Tottenham

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless. — Alan Moore

Not everyone is courageous by nature. But whether we are bold or reticent, God calls leaders to be of good courage and not to capitulate to fear. Such a call to courage would be rather pointless if nobody feared anything. Because fear is a real part of life, God gives us the Holy Spirit, who fills us with power. But we must let the power do its work, and not fear. — J. Oswald Sanders

In his book, Holy Spirit, Revelation and Revolution: Exploring Holy Spirit Dimensions, Reinhard Bonnke says: "Prayer is not enough to rouse a dead church. It needs the power of the Word imbued with the life of the Spirit. Life comes from the living Word. What we can do and what we should do is preach the Word. Praying for God to work is fine, but praying for Him to do what we should be doing is pointless. We cannot send his Spirit anywhere. He moves with us, and He is where we are. We cannot pray for God to save souls and bless people and then wait for something to happen. He sends us with the Word and the Spirit awaits us. It is our privilege to work for him, save souls for him. For anyone who thinks they do not have strength or power, the Word is their strength and their power. There are two important things to note: Holy Spirit meetings without the Word are human meetings, and prayer is not a substitute for the Word." 1 — Steve Bremner

His is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again. — Neal Stephenson

Thankfully, Coach had taught me a way of embracing the pain. He called that overwhelming rust of hurt 'The Moment of No Return', a point of pure agony when the body told an athlete to quit, to rest, because the pain was so damn tough. It was a tipping point. He reckoned that if an athlete dropped in The Moment, then all the pain that went before it was pointless, the muscles wouldn't increase their current strength. But if he could work through the pinch and run another two reps, maybe 3, them the body would physically improve in that time, and that was when an athlete grew stronger. — Usain Bolt

Where's my life gone? Where's it going? Looking across the grassy marshland to Flint and up the coast to Point Of Air, I start to wonder what all those poor fuckers in Wales are doing with their lives. Screwing? Sleeping in? Debating whether to take breakfast in bed to their broken fathers? Unlikely. They're probably doing what the gilded folk of Hollywood are doing, or Kowloon or Port Elizabeth. Worrying. Worrying about getting old, or about work, or about money, or about their boyfriend, mistress, lover, house, health, future. Life is shit. There is no fucking point to any of it. Not now that we've evolved past the survival stage. Maybe we used to live to hunt to kill to eat to live another day. Now we just kill time in as many sophisticated ways as possible. Pointless jobs. Pointless lives. Work. Television. Football. — Kevin Sampson

That's not interactive, there's no back-and-forth with the other player and how much fun is it to watch someone incredibly good at moving their eyes? And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King's idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn't understand the rules? Actually, now that Harry thought about it, that seemed like a surprisingly good hypothesis. Put him on a broomstick and tell him to catch the shiny thing ... — Eliezer Yudkowsky

A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it's gone. — Seth Godin

I suppose I could get a job to have something to do, but working when I don't have to work would be like pulling a straight and healthy tooth
pointless and extremely painful.
David Palmer — Stephen Reid Andrews

here's the thing about friends, I mean REAL friends: You can't just put up a poster at school and advertise for somebody and then hope you find the perfect one. It might work, I guess, but you'd look so pathetic and desperate that no one would want to be your friend, and so it would be kind of pointless — Laura Preble

When you're sending emails, you live and die by your subject line. Making it personal or funny can increase your open rate 10 times or more. At the very least, try to pitch some value rather than pointless bragging. 'Work Faster!' is better than 'Version 10.4 now available!' — John Wall

Yet already their destruction begins. It comes upon them gradually, in little ways. Bit by bit their belief in themselves erodes. A growing cynicism pervades their lives. Small acts of kindness and charity are abandoned as pointless and somehow indicative of weakness. Little failures of behavior lead to bigger ones. It is not enough to ignore the discourtesies of others; discourtesies must be repaid in kind. Men are intolerant and judgmental. They are without grace. If one man proclaims that God has spoken to him, another quickly proclaims that his God is false. If the homeless cannot find shelter, then surely they are to blame for their condition. If the poor do not have jobs, then surely it is because they will not work. If sickness strikes down those whose lifestyle differs from our own, then surely they have brought it on themselves. — Terry Brooks

But I tell you, nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it's his business to face it. He hasn't got the right to sidestep it like that. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist - the only thing he's good for - is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for - to give his view of life. Surely, we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us. — Katherine Ann Porter

The thing that is maybe the real difference, the fundamental difference, is that in adult literature you can have a literature of despair and end the work without any hope; you can have a literature of the absurd in which life is pointless, meaningless ... In children's literature you can have a tragic ending ... nevertheless, maybe what happens makes some kind of sense; maybe there is hope. We have got to pull out of ourselves some kind of hope. This is the key difference between writing for adults and children. — Lloyd Alexander

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed SOMETIMES, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. — Chad Harbach

Jean-Louis had never had a day's illness in his life. He was tall and as gnarled as an oak. The sun had baked his skin until it had the colour and toughness and stillness of a tree. With advancing years, he had lost his tongue. He now never spoke, considering such an activity pointless. — Emile Zola

She knew what bothered her at the store ... It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the pointless actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to do, might have done-and here it was the complicated procedures with moneybags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people from even serving the store as efficiently as they might-the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its expression. — Patricia Highsmith

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts. — Tobias Wolff

John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, to add his comments before leaving. McCloy said that all the talk of invading Japan struck him as rather "fantastic." The secretary asked, "Why not use the atomic bomb?" The meeting was once more called to order and McCloy's remark was discussed. Truman listened intently as the men at the table argued the merits of first warning the Japanese to surrender and then using the new weapon if the enemy ignored the ultimatum. The dialogue broke down because of one basic truth. No one in the room knew whether the device being readied in New Mexico would actually work. Without that knowledge, strategy was pointless. — William Craig

Upholders may struggle in situations where expectations aren't clear or the rules aren't established. They may feel compelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless. They may feel uneasy when they know they're breaking the rules, even unnecessary rules, unless they work out a powerful justification to do so. — Gretchen Rubin

Word For The Day BOONDOGGLE (BOON dahg'uhl) n. A pointless project. Work of no value, done merely to appear busy. Alternate Word ICKY (IK ee) adj. Very distasteful; disgusting. — Deb Baker

We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn. — Jacob Lund Fisker

I like to work fast. I despise not having the right tool or, worse, knowing I have it but not being able to find it. It's a pointless delay that wrecks my pace - and mood. — Adam Savage

Regret is pointless. I never do anything without first deciding to do it based on facts and feelings, and if it doesn't work out how I hoped, oh well - there's another notch on my experience belt. — Isaac Marion

We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain ...
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done. — Robert Aickman

I saw Hunter when I woke up. I saw Hunter as I ate a bowl of cereal. I saw him in human sexuality, where he seemed to be trying to break a record for most innuendos in one hour. I saw him at work where he assaulted my email. I saw him every night at dinner. I saw him go to and from the bathroom. I saw him at our stupid meditations, where were as pointless as socks with sandals.
I. Saw. Him. EVERYWHERE. — Chelsea M. Cameron