#futility

Indeed if fish had fish-lore and Wise-fish, it is probable that the business of anglers would be very little hindered. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#futility #wisdom #business

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin. ↗

— P.D. James

#pessimism #posterity #the-future #men

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God? ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#futility #god #writing #communication

Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. ↗

— Iain Pears

#cloud-cuckoo-land #desires #dreams #futility #imagination

...why will men fight and suffer to advance the interests of their masters, who fling them aside when they have no further use for them? ↗

— Arthur Findlay

#men

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. ↗

— Confucius

#knowledge #religion #religion

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. ↗

— Erich Maria Remarque

#war #torture

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#futility #shakespeare #shakespeare

Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues. ↗

— Cullen Hightower

#being #compounds #dead-end #dead-end street #futility

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all. ↗

— Emile M. Cioran

#exist #futility #irrational #life #most