Futile Endeavor Quotes

Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.

I think a lot of games in Oakland were just time being wasted, for a lack of a better phrase. I felt like I would play in some games that were four quarters, just like every other game, but it didn't feel like I was doing anything. It just felt like I was out there.

And what am I to do on the occasion? -- It seems an hopeless business.

If you know you don't have a win, then there's no use for you being in the game.

I might as well put up a trapeze on my front lawn and compete with some professional athlete, as go out speaking against Bryan.

One who sets the entire army in motion to chase an advantage will not attain it.

It is a folly second to none; to try to improve the world.

Aladdin, who said to his wife, I know it's not a lamp, keep rubbing! Never got a dinner!

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.

It looked exhausting and pointless, two things that should be avoided at all costs

Without gospel truths, man's efforts to reach his goals are like the northbound explorer who drove his dog sled feverishly northward on an ice pack that was flowing southward - only to find himself farther from his destination at the end of a hard day's journey than he had been at dawn!

No more I do, your Majesty. But what's that got to do with it? I might as well die on a wild goose chase as die here.

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.

Poetry is a mug's game.

The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I'll show you a loser, show me a hero and I'll show you a corpse.

To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.

It is sheer folly to take unwilling hounds to the chase.

I just think it’s amazing that a person could lose everything, chasing nothing.

There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment [Prohibition] as there is of a humming bird flying to Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.

Look not for musk in a dog's kennel.

A mission to entertain the world is a good one because it's impossible to achieve.

The worst mistake is to have the best ladder and the wrong wall.

Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?