Famous quotes containing the word futile:
“The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, or hideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“After experience taught me that all the ordinary
Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;”
—William Dewitt Snodgrass (b. 1926)