Life's Futility Quotes

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

Nihilism is best done by professionals.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

One cannot be a part-time nihilist.

It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

I think that storytelling, at its essence, allows us to feel like we all suffer the same insanity or a similar insanity of existence: that nobody escapes scot-free. We're all going to wind up - at the best-case scenario - 80, 85, 90, broken, in pain, and feeling like it was all a dream and not really understanding the point of any of it.

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, (135) Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: (140) So excellent a king; that was, to this.

Such is life and life is such and after all it isn't much. First a cradle. Then a hearse. It might have been better, but it could have been worse.

those who despair of life are not long for it.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

The fisher droppeth his net in the stream, And a hundred streams are the same as one; And the maiden dreameth her love-lit dream; And what is it all, when all is done? The net of the fisher the burden breaks, And always the dreaming the dreamer wakes.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to be entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured.

Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

All our pride is but a jest. None are worst and none are best. Grief and hope and joy and fear Play their pageant everywhere.