Pointlessness Quotes

I get down on my knees every mornin' an' give eternal thanks for the existence of girls in a otherwise pointless universe. ~ Garth Ennis

Everyone has at least one talent. It's just that some talents are pointless. ~ Andrea Kneeland

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair. ~ Terry Eagleton

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity. ~ Bill Bryson

When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be dead tomorrow, everything was pointless. It just didn't make any difference. It was pointless to the tree, it was pointless to every man in his outfit, pointless to everybody in the whole world. Who cared? It was not pointless only to him; and when he was dead, when he ceased to exist, it would be pointless to him too. More important: Not only would it be pointless, it would have been pointless all along.
This was an obscure and rather difficult point to grasp. Understanding of it kept slipping in and out on the edges of his mind. It flickered, changing its time sense and tenses. At those moments when he understood it, it left him with a very hollow feeling. ~ James Jones

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The tasks I set out for myself are what I do to beat the perfect pointlessness of life. ~ Henry Rollins

People like us were born to change the world. It's filled with shit. It's filled with people who did the things they did to you. It's filled with stupid pointlessness and ignorance and so much mundanity, it makes me want to scream. Don't you feel it too? ~ Laure Eve

The pain of aloneness and pointlessness is piercing. It demands relief. That single fact - that the pain of living apart from God is unbearable - exposes our sinfulness as horribly grotesque and foolish. We insist on finding relief without coming to God on His terms. ~ Larry Crabb

This usually happens in the white-collar classes: These people take to worshipping pointlessness. Examples are Twin Peaks, Christo's artwork, and academic liberal politics. But a strange thing happens; these people view their ultra pointlessness as a way of being like God. ~ Noah Cicero

What you discovered, gradually, was that only by structuring your own life pitilessly could you achieve anything fulfilling. Only by applying yourself to something arbitrary and pointless – and yet, crucially, of your own devising – could you escape the emptiness of unstructured diversion. In order to transcend pointlessness, you needed to become the merciless organiser of pointlessness. ~ Momus

Didn't it bother him that he was teaching his students poetry when he was certain it wouldn't make a difference in how their lives turned out? Didn't it bother him to be so sure that it was futile to even try? And what about us? What standards did we have? Weren't our fates sealed as well? What was I ever going to become? What stopped other people from looking at us and pitying us, how we didn't see the pointlessness in working so many jobs, moving from one shit place to another and scrimping on pennies, how we couldn't face the reality of our situation: that non of this was leading up to anywhere that was any different from where we had just been. ~ Jenny Zhang

Dawkins conveniently illustrates the rationalist's dilemma: How do you articulate a personal sense of purpose when you intellectually have concluded that the world is pointless? What is the purpose of pointing out pointlessness? What does it mean to find purpose in understanding pointlessness? Once again we are back at the conflict between Dawkins' intellect (the world is pointless) and his mental sensation of purpose (I will show others that faith is irrational). To understand the intensity of this felt purpose, Google Dawkins' bio and speaking engagements. His near-evangelical effort to convince the faithful of the folly of their convictions has the same zealous ring as those missionaries who feel it is their duty to convert the heathens. ~ Robert A. Burton

What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

In human closeness there is a secret edge,
Nor love nor passion can pass it above,
Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage,
And hearts be burst asunder with the love.
And friendship, too, is powerless plot,
And so years of bliss with noble tends,
When your heart is free and known not,
The slow languor of the earthy sense.
And they who strive to reach this edge are mad,
But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard -
Now you know why beneath your hand
You do not feel the beating of my heart. ~ Anna Akhmatova

I had a lot of anger against the way things 'should be done' - conforming to social norms, ticking boxes to gain acceptance. Frustration at the pointlessness and predictability of smalltalk. Oh and a lot of anger about tea, which the British seem to use to avoid actually saying anything. ~ Rupert Friend

She taught me the pointlessness of wishing for a different past and the futility of worrying about all of the frightening futures over which I had no control. ~ James R. Doty

The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn't enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness. ~ Terry Pratchett

One man's pointlessness is another's barbed satire. ~ Franklin P. Adams

the truth was that I had become a secret agent because I could not bear for another minute the pointlessness of life in the real world. ~ Charles McCarry

We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other. ~ Joshua Ferris

It left me with an unpleasant feeling as if I had traveled and gone nowhere, and the whole journey was reduced to this impression of pointlessness. ~ Christian Oster

In middle school I played against you once. And lost. I was so frustrated that I continued practicing even after I retired... And then when I entered high school, hell yeah, I laughed. The guy I vowed to defeat no matter what was standing right in front of me as one of my own teammates. But now it's pointless to hold a grudge. Rather, I wanted to make you recognize me. (Takao Kazunari) ~ Tadatoshi Fujimaki

What is meditation? ... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk. ~ Hermann Hesse

I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long. ~ Jeff Lindsay

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable. ~ Franz Kafka

Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special?
It doesn't. ~ Ramez Naam

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens. ~ David Levithan

I always succeed in not being jealous but only sometimes in comprehending the pointlessness of jealousy. ~ Franz Kafka

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke. ~ Aldous Huxley

The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.

Religious fundamentalists also develop an exagerrated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feurerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feurerback, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new Atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche , Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have priv ~ Karen Armstrong

If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself! ~ Philip K. Dick

In the end, all I remember is that while my lawyer went on talking, I could hear through the expanse of chambers and courtrooms an ice cream vendor blowing his tin trumpet out in the street. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed. The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get back to my cell and sleep. ~ Albert Camus

When I was very young, at the beginning my business was to work more than the others to show them their pointlessness. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other. ~ Florence King

The apparent pointlessness of fashion may be just what makes it so strong as a zeitgeist sensor. Even I, a designer, do not know why a certain proportion feels dated or why another one feels exciting at a given moment. I leave that to the cultural historians and theorists. ~ Jil Sander