"Futility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must always be somebody to listen to him. I think in his heart he hoped I should be his Boswell. He told me one day that he had made me his literary executor—poor devil. And he used to write me the absurdest long letters when I was away from him, letters which I read once and then tore up. The futility of the man! ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... to-day find we must either devote a considerable amount of our attention to getting and keeping money, and shape our activities—or, if you will, distort them—with a constant reference to that process, or we must accept futility. Whatever powers men want to exercise, whatever service they wish to do, it is a preliminary condition for most of them that they must, by earning something or selling something, achieve opportunity. If they cannot turn their gift into ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... all, and for the moment her heart shrank within her. But she saw, too, the futility of it all. She might have upbraided him; she might have returned in part the sorrows he had forced upon her, for he was wounded now and could not strike back. But she rose and stretched her arms ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... from which all his great dexterity and daring were needed to escape with credit and without loss. His plan was to pass between the fortifications and the river to Fair Oaks, moving thence to his destination. Its futility was demonstrated when Wilson's division attempted to move across the Mechanicsville road. It was found that all the ground was completely swept by the heavy guns of the defenses, while a strong force of infantry interposed. ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... morning, November 24th, I met Mr. BALFOUR crossing the Pont du Mont Blanc. He was looking at It with that dreamy smile of his, which seems to laugh at the littleness of man and the futility of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... the futility of the arguments by which Ptolemy had endeavored to demonstrate that a revolution of the earth was impossible. It was plain to him that there was nothing whatever to warrant refusal to believe in the rotation of the earth. In his clear-sightedness ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... aesthetically precious. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their sense of hearing—which had gradually come to understand its own futility when the tone of the conversation, at the dinner-table, became frivolous or merely mundane, without the two old ladies' being able to guide it back to the topic dear to themselves—would leave its receptive channels unemployed, so effectively that they were actually becoming atrophied. So that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... gently; all these people had become indifferent to him; he could no longer feel savage indignation at their little hypocrisies and malignancies. Their voices uttering calumny, and morality, and futility had become like the thin shrill angry note of a gnat on a summer evening; he had his own thoughts and his own life, and he passed ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the shouts of applause. Look at him again. He is now in the meridian of life; care has stamped its wrinkles upon his brow; disappointment has dimmed the lustre of his eye; sorrow has thrown its gloom upon his countenance. He looks backward upon the waking dreams of his youth, and sighs for their futility. Each revolving year seems to diminish something from his little stock of happiness, and discovers that the season of youth, when the pulse of anticipation beats high, is the only season of enjoyment. Who is he of aged locks? His form is bent and totters, his footsteps move but rapidly ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... do not bore your readers with dictionary definitions of words whose meaning no one doubts; that is a waste of good paper for you, and of good time for them; and we have seen in Chapter II the futility of the dictionary for cases in which there is real disagreement over the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... him, and accordingly steered for the south. He had not proceeded far in this direction, however, when we fell in with such quantities of ice as to interrupt our passage; but we still continued to force our way through. Convinced at length of the futility of the attempt, we altered our course to a directly opposite point, standing to the north, until we came abreast of Churchill, and then bore away for the strait, making Mansfield Island on the 7th of September. We encountered ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... difficulty—the futility of attempting to fasten on Emerson any particular doctrine, philosophic, or religious theory. Emerson wrings the neck of any law, that would become exclusive and arrogant, whether a definite one of metaphysics or an indefinite one of mechanics. He hacks his way up and down, as near as he can to ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... point like this is obviously very dangerous. Certain poets, especially among the moderns, may be said to choose imperfect rimes deliberately, both as a fresh means of securing variety and avoiding the monotony of hackneyed rimes, and also as a means of subtly suggesting the imperfection and futility of life. A few famous examples, defensible and indefensible, are: Wordsworth's robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths: soothe, pulse: culls; ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... always brought to recognize the futility of revenge," murmured Hippy with sad gentleness. "Let us agree to forget the bitter past, Reddy, and turn our faces toward the glorious future. I might also add that it doesn't pay to take up another's grievances. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... ready at an early hour on the morning of August 1st. Again the city was blue with police. But this time they were reinforced. As I walked through streets lined with soldiers in the workingmen's quarters, I realised the futility of any further anti-war demonstrations in ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... struggled against futility, which drove along his fingers. At each fresh attempt, he went back to the head of the drowned man. He might indeed assert his will, and avoid the lines he knew so well. In spite of himself, he drew ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... have believed that the business would resume, and for a time Rogers appears to have comforted him in his hope, but we cannot believe that it long survived. Young Hall, who had made such a struggle for its salvation, was eager to go on, but he must presently have seen the futility of any effort ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... much less of a man of the world in one sense, yet Pattison's mind was always in the world. In company he often looked as if he were thinking of the futility of dinner-party dialectics, where all goes too fast for truth, where people miss one another's points and their own, where nobody convinces or is convinced, and where there is much surface excitement with little real stimulation. That so shrewd a man should have seen so obvious a fact ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, and so did not, like some of his brilliant contemporaries, tread the primrose path which leads down to futility and death. He was always pre-eminently sane. While composing his transcendent Lear and Othello, he was suing Philip Rogers for L1 15s. 10d. While his fancy roamed in the fairyland of Midsummer Night's Dream, his investments were in ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... than usual as he crossed the kitchen floor. Undressing was a Titan's task, a monstrous futility, and he wept weakly as he crawled into bed, one shoe still on. He was aware of a rising, swelling something inside his head that made his brain thick and fuzzy. His lean fingers felt as big as his wrist, while in the ends of them was a remoteness of sensation vague and fuzzy ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... revert to force of some sort, for the attainment of spiritual ends. They become the tools of all sorts of secular ambitions which promise support in return for their co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which approaches the undoing of the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... these words the dark man, apparently feeling, as Sally had sometimes felt in the society of her brother Fillmore, the futility of mere language, turned sharply and stalked away up the beach, the dignity of his exit somewhat marred a moment later by the fact of his straw hat blowing off and being trodden ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... day the dashing Sir Hugh Gough arrived to take the supreme direction of the English forces. After these further reverses, the Chinese again begged a suspension of hostilities, and an armistice for a few days was granted. The local authorities were on the horns of a dilemma. They saw the futility of a struggle with the English, and the Cantonese had to bear all the suffering for the obstinacy of the Pekin government; but, on the other hand, no one dared to propose concession to Taoukwang, who, confident of his power, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... inner vision of what might have been, of what ought to be, and he helps on the good cause by the simple substitution of a nuance. He paints, as it were, and so do I!' His manifestations had a considerable variety, but a family likeness ran through them, which consisted mainly of their singular futility. It was this that made them offensive; they encumbered the field of conversation, took up valuable space, converted it into a sort of brilliant sun-shot fog. For a fib told under pressure a convenient place can ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... dreams were neither exactly Liberal nor Radical; they were simply Utopian. Even then, when he was most zealous, had any one proposed to him that he should inaugurate the new state of things, and be the first to divide his fortune, the futility of his theories would have struck him more plainly. Mingling in good society, the influence of clever men and beautiful women would, Lord Earle believed, convert his son in time. He did not oppose him, knowing that ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... cannonade continued for two days before Phipps realised its futility. On shore, Walley persisted for three days in attempting to force his way across the St. Charles; but his field-pieces were half buried in the mud, sickness had attacked his camp, and the rain and sleet of an early winter completed his ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... man knew and that man was Lloyd George. He realised the futility of a many-headed direction of the war: with his swift insight he saw the tragic toll that all this cross purpose was taking. He made a demand on Asquith for a small War Council that would put dash, vigour and success into the British side of the conflict. The Premier refused ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... cyclopean salients, the Ecossais, the Grand Jardin, and la Rochette, while further to the west, in extension of the line, were Fort Nassau and Fort Palatinat, above the faubourg of Menil. The sight produced in him a melancholy impression of immensity and futility. Of what avail were they now against the powerful modern guns with their immense range? Besides, the works were not manned; cannon, ammunition, men were wanting. Some three weeks previously the governor had invited the citizens to organize and form a National ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... and continued until Fall. The diary revealed the gradual transformation of a sunny disposition into a dark one, of a man with gregarious instincts into a wild beast asking only for solitude. Additions to the house were chronicled from time to time, with now and then a pathetic comment upon the futility of the additions. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... melancholy paralysed him more and more. He was too listless even to cater for his daily bread by writing his articles for the magazines. Why should he? He had nothing to say. Why should he pour out words and empty sound, and add one more futility to the herd of 'prophets that had become wind, and had no truth in them'? Those who could write without a conscience, without an object except that of seeing their own fine words, and filling their own pockets—let them do it: for his part he would have none of it. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... be communication. And yet the exasperation, the futility of trying to communicate with a friend who always interpreted everything one said and did as meaning something ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... they hoped to reach so soon; and ere the boats had separated from the ship five minutes, they were hopelessly asunder. Ludlow had early thought of the expedient of stranding the vessel, as the means of saving her people; but his better knowledge of their position, soon showed him the utter futility ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... warden's career has been twenty years of futility," he muttered. Lansing and Knox felt he wasn't actually speaking to them. "Now me, I'm a screw of the old school. Hardboiled, they say. I never expected a thing from a con ... and cons have lied to him, politicians have broken their promises ... ...
— Criminal Negligence • Jesse Francis McComas
... together, allowing them to look on. If they once get the fact thoroughly impressed upon them that we can both pot them, if necessary, at fifty yards, it will go a long way toward simplifying matters, by convincing them of the futility of attempting any tricks. But you must not let this very elementary precaution alarm you, sweetheart. As likely as not they will prove ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... sympathetic turn of mind, I cannot help being distressed by the prevalence of this singular practice among so large a portion of the human race. How is it possible that none of them should suspect the futility of their procedure? Or can it really be that I am uncomprehending? That in some way they are actually getting off the ground, or about ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... gnawing hunger and which greet their masters with terrified whines: spread over it all a pall of still moist heat and a sky arched by a molten sun. Contrive all this, then imbue every object—human and creature, animate and inanimate,—with an air of hopelessness, of the futility of effort, and you will have a typical Malay town as ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... bedizened face of earth, lies naught but the yawning maw of the insatiable universe. This very lake, with its countenance covered with rippling smiles, is only a cruel monster waiting to devour. Everything, even the most beautiful, typifies the inexorable laws of Fate and the futility of man's struggle with the forces he ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... into the mailbox, Jarvis went for his nightly prowl. His steps turned toward the crowded East Side district, where a new interest was beginning to attract him. Until now "men" were his only concern. These hot nights, as he tramped along, discouraged with his own futility, he was ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... during the fortnight; but now, having seen her, he found himself powerless to go on with his work. He pottered a while longer among the books and cards, but they were meaningless. They appeared an utter futility. Why index a lot of nonsense? Somehow this recalled his flare, his adumbration of some great idea connected with young Arkwright and the old Captain, and ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... neither very gay, nor very becoming to a swarthy monarch; and the never-to-be-altered costume lasted less than two years, to the great relief of the courtiers, especially of those who had risked betting with the king himself on its speedy disappearance. Expressing nothing but a caprice, it had the futility and ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the door and went back onto the deck, for he suddenly understood the futility of questions. Harrigan, in the meantime, had waited for the return of McTee, and when the latter did not come, the Irishman lingered on the bridge for an hour or more, pottering about with his brush in a pretense of finishing up a perfect job. His ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... ranks. Of what he accomplished in the ranks some outline has been given; its record stands as an answer to those who think, as many are tempted to think, that work in Parliament without office is, in these days, foredoomed to futility. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... legislature, and like other legislation of the kind it failed in its object, though the attempt was honestly made; and if the rate of wages fixed was somewhat low, its inequity was far surpassed by the exorbitance of the labourers' demands.[118] It was an endeavour to set aside economic laws, and its futility was rendered more certain by the depreciation of the coinage in 1351, which led to an advance in prices, and compelled the labourers to persevere in ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... all riders. And they knew that he would catch Wildfire or die in the attempt. From that moment their attitude toward Slone changed as subtly as had come the knowledge of his feeling. The gravity and gloom left their faces. It seemed they might have regretted what they had said about the futility of catching Wildfire. They did not want Slone to see or feel the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... upon this measureless immensity, felt myself humbled thereby, and with this came a knowledge of the futility of my life hitherto. And now (as often she had done, ere this) my companion voiced the thought I had ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... have felt himself culpable if he had not delivered an emphatic protest against Miss Wort's experiments. Mrs. Christie had come trembling to the gate—a pretty-featured woman, but sallow as old parchment—and the doctor addressed his expostulations to her. Many defeats had convinced him of the futility ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... standing around had drawn off a little, and I saw the absolute futility of any remonstrance. Have you ever seen a fly, who, in these hygienic days, finding no cobwebs to entangle him, is caught in a sheet of fly paper, finds himself more and more mired, and is finally quiet with the ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... tenderly—always. I know his heart better than you—better than he. It is only that he thinks the line he has taken a lifetime to lay out for you is the best. He is as sure of it as that the days follow each other. He sees only futility in the way you would go. I have no doubt his heart is sore over it at this moment, and that he is grieving in a way that would shock you, could you ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... impossible that we should ever meet, until you confront me at the bar of Judgment! You little can imagine what steps I took to render all this secure; and what was the result? Our strange interview in the bowels of the earth convinced me of the futility of my design." ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rest of the party had entered and closed the gate behind them that she at last issued from her retreat. Then fixing her gaze steadfastly on the gateway, she dropped a few tears. But inwardly conscious of their utter futility she retraced her footsteps and wended her way back into her apartment. And with heavy heart and despondent spirits, she divested herself of the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... annoyed Washington exceedingly. He perceived the spirit of the French Revolution animating his own people, making them regardless of law and justice, and drunk with ideas that tended to anarchy and confusion. He perceived the futility of attempts to enforce laws in support of the doctrines of his proclamation of neutrality, and the disposition of a large class of people to thwart that conservative policy which he advised as being most conducive to the welfare of the state. Yet, strong in his consciousness ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... letters. The Vigilance Association raised no protest, and I do not blame them. None would have been heard. But while the banquets were held and the speeches were published in the newspapers some of the members of the Association must have meditated sadly on the futility of their efforts and the death of Mr. Vizetelly. It requires a heavy blow of a very heavy mallet to get anything into some people's heads, and nothing short of the reception that was given to Zola could have affected the minds of the Vigilance Association. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Heaven knows, I might) I should have trembled, but still hoped and asked for her forgiveness; and yet mine had been a treason in the teeth of love. But let me tell you, madam," he pursued, with rising irritation, "where a husband by futility, facility, and ill-timed humours has outwearied his wife's patience, I will suffer neither man nor woman to misjudge her. She is free; the man has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bitter. In her rival's missions Jeanne refused to see anything but folly and futility. Nevertheless it was not for her to deny the possibility of the white lady's visitations; for to Jeanne herself did there not descend every day as many saints, angels and archangels as were ever painted on the pages of books or the walls of monasteries? In order to make up her ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual comparison of one person with another in point of efficiency, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... failure on Verena's part to carry out what she had undertaken, of the horror of seeing her bright career blotted out with darkness and tears, of the joy and elation that would fill the breast of all their adversaries at this illustrious, consummate proof of the fickleness, the futility, the predestined servility, of women. A man had only to whistle for her, and she who had pretended most was delighted to come and kneel at his feet. Olive's most passionate protest was summed up in her saying that if Verena were to forsake them it would ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... international peace propaganda illuminates this point. Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It had the same ground as ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... afterward did, the sole object of its energy the destruction of human life. Yet with a deepening knowledge of the instruments of death has come, I trust, a more revolting sense of the horrors and futility of war. The romance and chivalry of the profession of arms has gone forever. Let us hope that in the years to come the human mind will bend all its energies to right the wrongs and avert the contentions that result ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... very first meaning of the word 'Sculpture' into which the popular schools of existing art are plunged. I will not insist, now, on the uselessness, or worse, of their endeavours to represent the older art, and of the necessary futility of their judgment of it. The conclusions to which I wish to lead you on these points will be the subject of future lectures, being of too great importance for examination here. But you cannot spend your time in more profitable study than by examining and comparing, touch ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the meaning pervading this scene, something that was in my mind already, and that I had hardly dared to look at till now, became clear to me in its awful futility against the dangers, in all its remote consequences. It was a betrothal. The priest—Carlos, too—must have known that it had no binding power. To Carlos it was symbolic of his wishes. Father Antonio was thinking of the papal dispensation. I was a heretic. What if it were refused? But ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... across the campus to his fraternity house James did not feel that his call had been wholly successful. With him he carried a picture of his cousin's thin satiric face in which big expressive eyes mocked his arguments. But he let none of this sense of futility get into the report given next day to ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial, the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly clear. Follies and affectations may be sought with added fervor for the mind and the body, but the want of them is ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... unity with immigrants. Owners of land must be made to recognize that they are one with their tenants. The employer must be shown that his alliances are with those who help him to get his living. At once, when this task is put before us, we see the futility of the ideals of our time. Church workers and other teachers have played up before the eyes of the people those ideals which separate men into artificial classes. The consciousness of kind has been a consciousness of ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... fame in connection with balloon flight, conceived and described a curious vehicle, of which he even announced trials as impending. His trials were postponed time after time, and it appears that he became convinced in the end of the futility of his device, being assisted to such a conclusion by Lalande, the astronomer, who repeated Borelli's statement that it was impossible for man ever to fly by his own strength. This was in the closing days of the French monarchy, and the ascent of the Montgolfiers' first ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... that the Church could cease to be missionary and remain a Church? It has been well said that the Christian nations might as well face the utter futility of any hypothesis based upon the supposition that they can remain away from the Orient. The occurrences of recent years have made changes in their relation to the world which they can no more recall than they can alter the course of a planet. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... once more took the open path to Aldport, and he looked on the wide hemisphere about him—the heavens, with their glowing constellations, all spread out without an obscurity or an obstruction. He felt for one moment the folly and futility of earthly things, and his heart seemed to wither in the immensity into which ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... afterwards carried away. The word [Hebrew: ed], as well as the twofold [Hebrew: wM], are emphatic. Irresistibly, the divine judgment advances to its last goal; but as irresistibly does divine mercy wrest from the enemies the prey which seemed to have been given to them even for ever.—The futility of all attempts to explain away the distinct prophecy of the Babylonish captivity in this passage has been shown in the Dissertations on the Genuineness of Daniel, p. 151 sqq. How even Caspari could ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... you can have no conception how wretched a life like mine is. And the futility of everything is embittered by the consciousness that it is from no superiority to such things that I do not ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... she called after him, as the boat shot under the nearest bridge. Anything, anything, to be alone, away from the folly and futility that would be all she had left if Nick were to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... situated completely in the posterior face of the skull, or as much further back than that of the Gorilla, as that of the Gorilla is further back than that of Man; while, as if to render patent the futility of the attempt to base any broad classificatory distinction on such a character, the same group of Platyrhine, or American monkeys, to which the Mycetes belongs, contains the Chrysothrix, whose occipital foramen is situated far more forward than in ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... was one that might have passed between two tigers recognizing the futility of a struggle and, after a moment's hesitation, turning ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... visions of peace, and developed to a certain extent a recognition of the rights of nations and an interest in one another's welfare. There was an advance in the theory at least of international justice. Also the world was shocked with the terror of war as well as its futility and terrible waste. While national selfishness was not eradicated, it was in a measure subdued, and a feeling of co-operation started which eventually will result in unity of feeling, thought, and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... came the climax of futility. The American Sugar Refining Company had purchased refineries in Philadelphia which enabled it to control, with its other plants, ninety-eight per cent. of the refining business in the country. The government asked the courts to cancel the purchase on the ground that it was ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... District Council way, it is a thing to end forever. I have always hated it, so far that is as my imagination enabled me to realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes quite closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of a constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty, muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every man to give his life and all that he has if by so doing he ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... February 6, 1900, the sum of L4,437 sterling was paid. The allegation in this case was that of carrying contraband, but the ship was finally released without the cargo being examined, a fact which indicates that in this, the last of the German vessels to be seized, Great Britain realized the futility of attempting to interfere with ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... were unrealized no mediation would be attempted. McClellan, driven out of the Peninsula, had been removed, and August saw the Northern army pressed back from Virginia soil. It was now Washington and not Richmond that seemed in danger of capture. Surely the North must soon realize the futility of further effort, and the reports early in July from Washington dilated upon the rapid emergence ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... was to rush to the boat, and rejoin his comrades, to set signals, burn bonfires—anything which might possibly call the attention of those on board. Then he considered the futility of such endeavors, and he ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that occurred to Anderson to say, and he realized its futility as he spoke; but any thing was better than to stand and listen to that horrible voice, and look at the broad, white face of the landlord, all perspiring and quivering as he clutched the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... that the Navigation Acts and the futility of all attempts to escape their baleful effects, were largely instrumental in bringing on Bacon's Rebellion? As prosperity and contentment are the greatest safeguards of the public peace, so poverty, ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts, yet by new patches on the old garment. If, therefore, the readers of that work know any more familiar expressions which are as suitable to the thought as those seem to me to be, or if they think they can show the futility of these thoughts themselves and hence that of the expression, they would, in the first case, very much oblige me, for I only desire to be understood: and, in the second case, they would deserve well of philosophy. But, as long as these thoughts ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... different type, the verdict cannot be wholly unfavourable. The Kingdom of Earth is to the thick-skinned, and bad manners have a distinct vital value. A man, too sensitive to the rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of futility. Either he will become a dilettante, which is the French way, or he will take to drink and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in Russian fiction. Bad manners have indeed a distinct ethical value. We all experience moods in which we politely assent to the thing that ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... by the court martial, had left no glimpse of hope, at head quarters, that the prosecution of Hall, on the charge of mutiny, on which he had been imprisoned, could be attempted with any prospect of success—the futility of any further proceedings against Louallier was evident—Jackson, therefore, put an end to Hall's imprisonment on Saturday, the 11th of March. The word imprisonment is used, because Eaton assures his ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... storm weighs heavily On their strained spirits: sometimes one will say Some trivial thing as though to ward away Mysterious powers, that imminently lie In wait, with the strong exorcising grace Of everyday's futility. Desire Becomes upon a sudden a crystal fire, Defined and hard:—If he could kiss her face, Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her hand Brushes on his ... Ah, can she understand? Or is she pedestalled above the touch Of his desire? He wonders: dare ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... mysterious progeny despise him, since he was the cause of their being brought into the world of woe! When Eve attempted to comfort him he drove her from him with harsh words, saying that in time to come women would be the unhappy cause of all man's misery, as she had been of his. At last, seeing the futility of his outcries Adam began to cheer his wife, recalling the promise that their offspring should crush the head of the serpent, and suggested to her that they go to their former place of prayer and pour forth to God ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of numbers told at last; and, when two of the French had been severely wounded, the other two, realizing the futility of further fighting in the face of overwhelming odds, drew off, and, supporting their wounded companions, returned to ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... hasten the tearing down and clearing away, I plunged into the hardest and dirtiest tasks, but at night, after the men were gone, dark moods of deep depression came over me, moments in which the essential futility of my powers overwhelmed me ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular dogmatism to universal bewilderment; and a chief agent in the change has been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit, his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his sling! How fatally they would ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the futility of looking for any real reforms under this optional system was demonstrated. Japan sent her most renowned statesman, Prince Ito, to discharge the duties of resident-general; but even he, in spite of patience and tact, found that some less optional methods ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... little dog, who always slept with one eye and ear alert for Muir's movements, had, as usual, quietly left his warm nest and followed his adopted master. Muir was scolding and expostulating with him as if he were a boy. I chuckled to myself at the futility of Muir's efforts; Stickeen would now, as always, do just as he pleased—and he would ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... fattened by years of private and public rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of his natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... be borne; by the township, the county, the State, the nation, or by private enterprise? Let us take up these points seriatum. Professor Upham, of the United States Geologic Survey, a man of unquestionable honesty and no mean authority generally, thinks that the cost alone demonstrates the futility of attempting the artesian system. He bases his opinion on the Jamestown well, which cost $7,000. Yet if, as there seems to be no doubt, irrigation will increase the wheat crop by at least ten bushels an acre, even this large expense would be warranted by the increase in land value. But it ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... the loveliness of mellow-tinted hills, now ordered by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and motored down to eat it. After that, they looked at the horses, and with the feeling upon them of the futility of such shows yawned a bit. In due season, they held, the horse would be as extinct as the Dodo, and as mythical ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... respond to a toast which should allow her to say anything she liked. Three most enjoyable weeks were spent at home and during this time Miss Anthony addressed the W. C. T. U. She expressed herself in no uncertain tones as to the futility of third parties, declaring that the Prohibition party already had taken some of the best temperance men out of Congress, and made a speech so forcible that it lifted the bonnets of some of the timid sisters. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... him was the pitiful futility of his father's persistence in trying to impose his ways, his beliefs, his will, upon one so rapidly growing into full independence. The only sanction he had was a tradition daily becoming more fragile. He was in ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... contemptuously with the edge of his palm. "You can't talk that stuff to me!" She understood the futility of appeal; he turned from her and she looked for a moment on the bulging scruff of ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... his dark face grew even blacker with rage at the futility of his position. With anyone other than Juliet Bissell, perhaps, he realized that insistent pressure of his suit might have favorable results. But this cool, calm girl offered no opportunity for ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... indomitable spirits some men have got. As well might they have attempted to stop the course of time! They succeeded, however, in causing vexatious delays, and, in July, had the audacity to fling a wreck in the very teeth of the builders, as if to taunt them with the futility of their labours. ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... highroad, however, the life along the shore gave us little time for the futility of regret. Regret, at best, is a barren thing: like the mule, it is incapable of perpetuating its own mistakes; it appears to apologize, indeed, for its stupidity by making its exit as speedily as possible. With the next turn of the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... superfluous ounce of flesh to carry. He was all bone and sinew; the saddle resting upon his head was hardly an impediment to him. Lynde, however, was not going to be vanquished without a struggle; though he recognized the futility of pursuit, he pushed on doggedly. A certain tenacious quality in the young man imperatively ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... theory of selection, this inability arises not from the theory of Darwin but from the inadequacy of our experience. For as yet the empiric prerequisites for an objective judgment regarding the validity or futility of the theory of selection are entirely lacking." Every naturalist who believes in the inductive method must needs draw the conclusion from these naive admissions, that, as Darwinism lacks the empiric prerequisites, it should ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... Assemblies for the support of their government in peace, and for public aids in time of war; TO ACKNOWLEDGE that this legal competency has had a dutiful and beneficial exercise; and that experience has shown the benefit of their grants, and the futility of Parliamentary taxation as ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... back to their daily work among their friends and acquaintances, with no feeling of shame, because everybody does it, and public opinion, the only force that could stop it, is on their side. The parson looks on with unutterable sadness at the futility of his efforts; but the material is altogether too raw for successful ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... intimate that she was a miserable sinner, but that is not what I mean. She concerned herself greatly with the manners of the great, and deplored their cards and fashionable falsehoods. John Newton, captain as he had been of a slaver, saw the futility of ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... doctor in a minute consulting-room and his shirt-sleeves, a tall tumbler at his elbow; at least I caught sight of the tumbler on entering; thereafter he stood in front of it, with a futility which had ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... service of natural lusts, into a region above natural instrumentalities, it accustoms us to that rarer atmosphere, so that we may learn to breathe it for its own sake. By the time we discover the mechanical futility of religion we may have begun to blush at the thought of using religion mechanically; for what should be the end of life if friendship with the gods is a means only? When thaumaturgy is discredited, the childish desire to work ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... progress is, I suppose, what is implied by the title and the symbolic staircase (if it is a staircase?) on the wrapper. But my trouble was that I could never discern in the sweet girl-graduate any development of character from the pretentious futility of her earliest appearance. Perhaps I am prejudiced. Undeniably Miss McLEOD can draw a certain type of prig with a horrible facility. But the antiquated modernity of her scheme, flooded as it is with the New Dawn of, say, a decade ago, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... remained some little while, musing over these casual relics of antiquity thus left like wrecks upon this distant shore of time, telling no tale but that such beings had been and had perished, teaching no moral but the futility of that pride which hopes still to exact homage in its ashes and to live in an inscription. A little longer, and even these faint records will be obliterated and the monument will cease to be a memorial. ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... meaning or purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a Hereafter to be desired?—incessantly he beat straining wings in the void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the futility of man's hopes; ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... exalted in the minds of the living. Their judgment was softened by a vague feeling of awe, but they were not troubled, while they stood in a solemn and curious row around her grave, by any sense of the pathetic futility of individual suffering in the midst of a universe that creates and destroys in swarms. The mystery aroused no wonder in their thoughts, for the blindness of habit, which passes generally for the vision of faith, had paralyzed in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... gesture was the turning-point of existence. By the time he was wandering in the mysterious garden again in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of his ordinary mien had fallen from him; he was a man with many reasons for happiness. Lord Galloway was a gentleman, and had offered him an apology. Lady Margaret was something better than a lady, a woman at least, and had perhaps given him ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... against the deep roll of the waves. The immensity of the arched sky above, with the dim, flat land on one side, and the expanse of darkening sea on the other, seemed to give to those dance tunes an indescribable melancholy. They seemed to epitomize all the shortness and futility of the little lives which had flickered for a few years on the edge of that ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... should take ourselves seriously and at our full value. Not that we should over-appreciate ourselves and think ourselves alone the salt of the earth. There is such a thing as over-appreciation that must in the end lead to futility and vanity. But equally, there is such a thing as self-depreciation, and to a certain extent I cannot but feel that we Jews have been more or less guilty of that in the past, have more or less, particularly in our college and university life, assumed a deprecating attitude, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... We also remark the futility of locking up an inconvenient wife, fabled to be defunct, in one's own country house. Had Mr. Rochester, in "Jane Eyre," studied the "Sicilian Romance," he would have shunned an obsolete system, inconvenient at best, and apt, in the long run, to ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the pride, and power, and honours which may await a contrary course." After this preamble, Mr. Sadler argued at great length against the principles of the bill, and its dangerous tendency toward the Protestant church: and showed its utter futility in remedying the evils which oppressed, or repaying the wrongs which she had suffered from so many generations. He remarked:—"Ireland degraded, deserted, oppressed, pillaged, is turbulent; and you listen to the selfish recommendations of her agitators. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... state. With a curious respect for those theories his familiarity with the secret social history of France had caused him to entertain, he hoped and attempted to retain a hold over the king through the influence of Lady Yarmouth, though the futility of such means had already been demonstrated to him by his relations with Queen Caroline's "ma bonne Howard." The influence of Newcastle and Sandwich, however, was too strong for him; he was thwarted and over-reached; and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... one Mediator and Intercessor, when there are thousands! How will he be necessarily startled to find 'seven' sacraments grown out of 'two'! How will he be shocked at the apparent—of course only apparent—contempt with which St. Paul speaks of ritual and ceremonial matters, of the futility of 'fasts' and distinctions of 'meats and drinks,' of observing 'days and months and years.' and so on. His whole language, I contend, would necessarily mislead the simple into heresies innumerable. Of numberless texts, again, even if the meaning were not mistaken, the true meaning ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the futility of argument, and, indeed, in the violent reaction that attacks such ardent natures, she felt too numb to make the attempt even had she wished. She stood staring at Mrs. Lear with her eyes dark in her pale face and the first presage of ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... its power upon petty failings; let it watch diligently against the incursion of vice, and leave foppery and futility to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Seeing the futility of explaining a thing he had many times explained, Mostyn rose. Before him the open doorway framed an oblong patch of calm gray sky, and toward it he moved, his mental hands impotently outstretched, a soundless cry welling up from the ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the wisdom of antiquity (the shadows whereof are in the poets) in the description of torments and pains, next unto the crime of rebellion, which was the giants' offence, doth detest the offence of futility, as in Sisyphus and Tantalus. But this was meant of particulars: nevertheless even unto the general rules and discourses of policy and government there is due a reverent ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... futility of attempting to parley with the infuriated wretches below, he ran into the room, exclaiming, "Put on some clothes, Emily! shoes first—quick—quick, wife!—your life depends upon it. I'll bring down the children and wake the servants. We must escape from the house—we are attacked ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... as much of life as I have,' answered the magician, 'when the AEons are to him merely as drops in a bucket which he will never kick—and when he suffers,' he added mournfully, 'from attacks of multiplex personality, he recognises the futility of personal explanations.' ...
— HE • Andrew Lang |
