Pointless Inspirational Quotes

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Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.
Bill Watterson
There's 7 billion 46 million people on the planet and most of us have the audacity to think we matter.
George Watsky
A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo...
Russell Brand (My Booky Wook)
The world is all pointless accident... I exist, nothing else.
John Gardner (Grendel)
words do matter. They’re not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history and they wouldn’t be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn’t listen to songs,
Cath Crowley (Words in Deep Blue)
Are you searching for purpose? Then write something, yeah it might be worthless Then paint something then, it might be wordless Pointless curses, nonsense verses You'll see purpose start to surface No one else is dealing with your demons Meaning maybe defeating them Could be the beginning of your meaning, friend.
twenty one pilots
The following day I abandoned my pointless searching and planted myself in one of the open air-cafés where I drank coffee and tried to find inspiration for the song I owed the Maer. Ten hours I spent there, and the only act of creation I accomplished was to magically transform nearly a gallon of coffee into marvelous, aromatic piss.
Patrick Rothfuss (The Wise Man’s Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2))
Why waste yourself doing something pointless, when you can spend your life being productive in your own eyes?
Neil Walker (Drug Gang (Drug Gang, #1))
Life changes us. To wish otherwise is pointless.
Nalini Singh (Angels of Darkness (Alphas, #0.5; Guild Hunter, #3.5; The Guardians, #7.5; Samaria))
Life is a constellation, the individual moments in our lives seem so pointless sometimes; but when you look at the whole picture, you can see that those little moments formed memories.
Alex Rogers (I'm Only Human After All (The Empowerment Series Book 1))
Stay positive, all other choices are pointless punishments to your psyche.
Joe Peterson (Help Me Live... As I Die, Cancer vs. the Power of Love)
The pain of problems is a call to find solutions rather than a reason for unhappiness and inaction, so it's silly, pointless, and harmful to be upset at the problems and choices that come at you (though it’s understandable).
Ray Dalio
The fact is saying yes hadn't been a pointless exercise at all. It had been pointful. It had the power to change lives and set people free... It had the power of adventure. Sometimes the little opportunities that fly at us each day can have the biggest impact.
Danny Wallace (Yes Man)
The ripple effect is change. Eventually, the rings of the ripples change; they either become smaller or wider in length. No matter the size, sooner or later, the ripple will vanish, but the question is—did it leave an effect or was it pointless? What impact does the ripple effect have on you? Will you reach for great heights, or will you let the ripple effect’s “purpose” pass you by?
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
But I do believe that every single thing we’ve done leads to everything we do, and that it’s kind of pointless to regret the past when it’s the cause of our present.
Shaun David Hutchinson (Brave Face)
It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.
Terry Pratchett (Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind, #3))
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
Bible study without Bible experience is pointless. Knowing Psalm 23 is different from knowing the shepherd.
Kingsley Opuwari Manuel
All pursuits are pointless and fruitless unless and until love and compassion are found and then are the foundation and destination of all you do
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Thankfully, Coach had taught me a way of embracing the pain. He called that overwhelming rust of hurt 'The Moment of No Return', a point of pure agony when the body told an athlete to quit, to rest, because the pain was so damn tough. It was a tipping point. He reckoned that if an athlete dropped in The Moment, then all the pain that went before it was pointless, the muscles wouldn't increase their current strength. But if he could work through the pinch and run another two reps, maybe 3, them the body would physically improve in that time, and that was when an athlete grew stronger.
Usain Bolt (Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography)
Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site.
Holly Bourne (The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting)
The dangerously high level of stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back to the safer ground of uniformed stupidity.
Jasper Fforde (The Thursday Next Chronicles)
We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power)
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 privileged lives and absorbing work.
Karen Armstrong (The Case for God)
All this to say, what should a woman fight for? Given her limited resources, limited time and energy and inspiration, what is worth fighting for? Is it art? In the grand scheme of things, it sometimes seems so pointless, even selfish. To force one’s point of view on the world- who really needs it, especially when a child needs a mother so immediately? I don’t have any answers other than that art seems essential, as essential as mothering. In order to be a self, it is essential. I should perhaps cease being a person without it. Is that enough of a reason, that it matters to me?
Rachel Yoder (Nightbitch)
She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half "bogeret l'reshut nafsha"--an adult wit authority over her own soul. The Torah taught, Choose life. And so, rather than die of pride, Sofia Mendes sold what she had to sell, and she survived.
Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow (The Sparrow, #1))
Have you ever wondered What happens to all the poems people write? The poems they never let anyone else read? Perhaps they are Too private and personal Perhaps they are just not good enough. Perhaps the prospect of such a heartfelt expression being seen as clumsy shallow silly pretentious saccharine unoriginal sentimental trite boring overwrought obscure stupid pointless or simply embarrassing is enough to give any aspiring poet good reason to hide their work from public view. forever. Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED. Burnt shredded flushed away Occasionally they are folded Into little squares And wedged under the corner of An unstable piece of furniture (So actually quite useful) Others are hidden behind a loose brick or drainpipe or sealed into the back of an old alarm clock or put between the pages of AN OBSCURE BOOK that is unlikely to ever be opened. someone might find them one day, BUT PROBABLY NOT The truth is that unread poetry Will almost always be just that. DOOMED to join a vast invisible river of waste that flows out of suburbia. well Almost always. On rare occasions, Some especially insistent pieces of writing will escape into a backyard or a laneway be blown along a roadside embankment and finally come to rest in a shopping center parking lot as so many things do It is here that something quite Remarkable takes place two or more pieces of poetry drift toward each other through a strange force of attraction unknown to science and ever so slowly cling together to form a tiny, shapeless ball. Left undisturbed, this ball gradually becomes larger and rounder as other free verses confessions secrets stray musings wishes and unsent love letters attach themselves one by one. Such a ball creeps through the streets Like a tumbleweed for months even years If it comes out only at night it has a good Chance of surviving traffic and children and through a slow rolling motion AVOIDS SNAILS (its number one predator) At a certain size, it instinctively shelters from bad weather, unnoticed but otherwise roams the streets searching for scraps of forgotten thought and feeling. Given time and luck the poetry ball becomes large HUGE ENORMOUS: A vast accumulation of papery bits That ultimately takes to the air, levitating by The sheer force of so much unspoken emotion. It floats gently above suburban rooftops when everybody is asleep inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night. Sadly a big ball of paper no matter how large and buoyant, is still a fragile thing. Sooner or LATER it will be surprised by a sudden gust of wind Beaten by driving rain and REDUCED in a matter of minutes to a billion soggy shreds. One morning everyone will wake up to find a pulpy mess covering front lawns clogging up gutters and plastering car windscreens. Traffic will be delayed children delighted adults baffled unable to figure out where it all came from Stranger still Will be the Discovery that Every lump of Wet paper Contains various faded words pressed into accidental verse. Barely visible but undeniably present To each reader they will whisper something different something joyful something sad truthful absurd hilarious profound and perfect No one will be able to explain the Strange feeling of weightlessness or the private smile that remains Long after the street sweepers have come and gone.
Shaun Tan (Tales from Outer Suburbia)
All the wealth in the world is nothing, pointless - of no true value - if you yourself feel worthless.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Any travel is pointless if you don't come back. Any travel is pointless if you don't really leave yourself back.
Carlos José Pérez Sámano (África Sueño de Sombras Largas)
You shouldn't be wasting your time worrying about what's going to happen after you die. It's pointless. Think about what's happening now. In your life. That's what's important. So change the subject, will you?
Clare Furniss (The Year of the Rat)
A day will come when God will set everything right and wipe the tears from our eyes, and in that day death will be no more. But in the meantime, we can take comfort in the fact that God understands our pain. In our moments of immense grief and heartache, God is weeping with us. Scripture says that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18). He has a special place in His heart for hurting people. Therefore, far from being pointless, suffering is an opportunity to worship God and experience His loving presence in a deep and profound way.
David Wilber (When Faith Works: Living Out the Law of Liberty According to James)
Change isn’t a choice; it’s already happening. You are atoms and molecules in motion… you can’t avoid change; you ARE change. The question is whether you will EMBRACE the power of change to enhance your life or continue to exhaust yourself in the pointless endeavor to halt it.
Steve Maraboli
As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance. For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith. Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground. We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts. These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”. And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success. So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ. My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God.
William Lane Craig (Hard Questions, Real Answers)
I personally feel and believe that relationships are neither useless nor pointless; it is you who make it feel so, I believe, love is so beautiful, it feels so perfect with the right person but, your life changes for the bad if you are with someone who cannot support you, who never encourages you, who can’t stand with you, that’s not love by the way! You just name is as love and escape the moment it feels tough.
Jyoti Patel
There is a curious phenomenon in Western intellectual life, namely that of being right at the wrong time. To be right at the wrong time is far, far worse than having been wrong for decades on end. In the estimation of many intellectuals, to be right at the wrong time is the worst possible social faux pas; like telling an off-colour joke at the throning of a bishop. In short, it is in unforgivable bad taste. There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.
Theodore Dalrymple
The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can’t polish what you haven’t written. Things that made for a normal life—like a daily routine that followed the sun—took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn’t a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep. He would often awake with a new idea—as if he’d merely been on a break and not unconscious—and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot’s seat in a ship that could go anywhere.
Vincent H. O'Neil (Death Troupe)
We live in a world that tells us sadness is a pointless, useless emotion. There’s visible and invisible pressure to do something with sadness so that it’s not sad anymore. But sadness doesn’t need to be alchemized into action or positivity right away. Sometimes it’s okay to just sit with and feel your sadness, free from the obligation to make it something else. Sadness is a healthy, more-than-normal response to losing someone you love. So, let yourself have your sadness, freed from the pressure to transmute it. Know that sadness, just like every other human emotion, will pass.
Shelby Forsythia (Your Grief, Your Way: A Year of Practical Guidance and Comfort After Loss)
That there was an essential pointlessness to such contests, an unvarying and remorseless quality much like that of the desert itself, did not in any way lessen the enjoyment of those who indulged in them. The great deeds performed by a tribe’s ancestors, rehearsed as they were in glowing, if suspiciously interchangeable, verses by its poets, offered its warriors both backdrop and inspiration. Memories of ancient battles, if gilded with sufficient imagination, might serve to dignify even the most squalid scuffle. As a result, among the Arabs, past and present were barely distinguishable.
Tom Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire)
Prayer is one of the few spiritual practices that is pointless unless God is real. Meditation calms the body whether or not there's a spiritual being receiving our deliberate breathing and clear mind. Reading sacred texts aligns us with the wisdom of our ancestors whether or not it was divinely inspired. Church attendance connects us to the needs of our community. Fasting cleanses the body of toxic substances. Resting on Sundays allows us to let go of stress and worry. But prayer? Taking time to pour out our needs and our anxieties, demanding change, confessing sin, crying out for help - all of these things depend upon the existence of God, and specifically the existence of a God who hears and responds to our cries. Prayer in the face of insurmountable problems is an admission of weakness and need. Prayer is a commitment to a better future, a sign of faith that the world will one day be made right. Prayer is an act that emerges out of helplessness. Prayer is an act of hope.
Amy Julia Becker (White Picket Fences: Turning toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege)
My Voice by Paul Stephen Lynch Why was I born? What is my purpose here on this earth? Is there more out there after this life ends? At some point we all ask ourselves these questions. I can tell you with absolute certainty that for me, the answer to all three of these questions is… “I don’t know”. However, what I do know is that while I am here I am meant to learn from my mistakes, to grow through my pain, and to evolve. What will I be changed into? Again, I do not know. Perhaps I will become someone who is more courageous, more charitable, more peaceful, more dignified, more honest and more loving. I am very hopeful but nothing in life is guaranteed. Although, I have discovered that speaking from my heart and telling my truth is an integral part of my transformation. It is my voice. In those times in my life when I have experienced great pain – sadness, loss, conflict or depression – those have been the times that have brought me closest to this transformation. I recently realized that pain is one of the few things that seems to really get my attention and that I have spent a lot of my time just coasting down life’s path. Perhaps this is the reason why I seem to grow the most during the hard times, even though it often takes all the energy I can muster just to get through them. Quite a few years ago, while I was visiting a friend who was dying from AIDS, I saw a tapestry on the hospital wall that read: The Chinese word for “crisis” has two characters. One stands for danger; the other for opportunity. The times in my life that have been the most difficult have quite often proven to be my best opportunities for growth; to get closer to becoming the person I am meant to be. Of course, this doesn’t mean that painful circumstances ~ like HIV and AIDS ~ are good things or that they are in any way “all for the best” ~ or, that they even make any kind of sense. It just means that I know that there is always the possibility that something positive can ultimately come out of that which is incredibly bad. However, change does not happen in seclusion and I will likely need help from friends, family, teachers and even from people I do not know at all For me to continue moving closer to becoming the person I was born to be, I first needed to accept who I am. For me, that was relatively easy (easy does not mean painless mind you) and it happened at the unusually young age of twelve. The second step to transforming my life means I need to tell others the truth about who I am. I have been doing this ever since my personal acceptance occurred. As a result, I have learned that there will always be those people who cannot be trusted with the truth. There are also those who will simply never be able to understand my truth no matter what anyone says to them. However, others will hear the truth very clearly, understand it completely, and even care greatly. Moreover, I can hear, I understand, and I care. I have also learned that there are times when it is better to be silent. Sometimes words are just not necessary… Like when I am sharing with someone who already knows my heart. And then there are times when words are pointless… like when I have already spoken my truth to someone, yet they are simply not capable of hearing what it is that I am saying. This is when I need to find other ears. Sometimes, a silent sign of love is the best way, or even the only way that I can express myself. However, at those times, my silence is a choice that I am making. It is not being forced on me by fear or shame… and I will never let it be because… it is MY voice!
Paul S. Lynch
Among the clues for sorting out the truth is how a leader handles things going wrong—not the show that happens in front of crowds but in the daily meetings and decisions where there is no audience. If they genuinely share credit but take the lion's share of blame, you might just have someone sincerely invested in doing what's best. A leader who shields others from things that get in the way inspires everyone to do the same. It's small habits like these that shift a culture away from the pointless exercises of finger pointing and dodging blame and toward a contagious confidence that the best work of your career is possible right now. The feeling that there's nothing in your way is something few feel often in their careers, if they ever feel it at all.
Scott Berkun (The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work)
A new happiness had settled over him and he seemed relieved. She wondered if he’d been testing himself: how long until she trusted him, would she ever? A king must inspire trust. And for her, a miracle too: she’d chosen this, or felt like she had. He needed her. To keep him calm. To map out every one of a thousand horrible deaths that might befall him in the coming months or years. He was afraid of his destiny, chokingly, overwhelmingly afraid, and suddenly it didn’t matter whether he believed in magic or she did or if it was real or if her mother was right and they were all just fools walking in a pointless, bloody parade toward the end of time. Her eyes were open. She could run or not, she could love him or not, she could miss her brother or hate him forever. It was all going to hurt.
Julia Whicker (Wonderblood)
Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like.
Bart Schultz (The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians)
Let us question these questions. Anger is neither legitimate nor illegitimate, meaningful nor pointless. Anger simply is. To ask, “Is my anger legitimate?” is similar to asking, “Do I have a right to be thirsty? After all, I just had a glass of water fifteen minutes ago. Surely my thirst is not legitimate. And besides, what’s the point of getting thirsty when I can’t get anything to drink now, anyway?
Harriet Lerner
December 20th FEAR THE FEAR OF DEATH “Do you then ponder how the supreme of human evils, the surest mark of the base and cowardly, is not death, but the fear of death? I urge you to discipline yourself against such fear, direct all your thinking, exercises, and reading this way—and you will know the only path to human freedom.” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.26.38–39 To steel himself before he committed suicide rather than submit to Julius Caesar’s destruction of the Roman Republic, the great Stoic philosopher Cato read a bit of Plato’s Phaedo. In it, Plato writes, “It is the child within us that trembles before death.” Death is scary because it is such an unknown. No one can come back and tell us what it is like. We are in the dark about it. As childlike and ultimately ignorant as we are about death, there are plenty of wise men and women who can at least provide some guidance. There’s a reason that the world’s oldest people never seem to be afraid of death: they’ve had more time to think about it than we have (and they realized how pointless worrying was). There are other wonderful resources: Florida Scott-Maxwell’s Stoic diary during her terminal illness, The Measure of My Days, is one. Seneca’s famous words to his family and friends, who had broken down and begged with his executioners, is another. “Where,” Seneca gently chided them, “are your maxims of philosophy, or the preparation of so many years’ study against evils to come?” Throughout philosophy there are inspiring, brave words from brave men and women who can help us face this fear. There is another helpful consideration about death from the Stoics. If death is truly the end, then what is there exactly to fear? For everything from your fears to your pain receptors to your worries and your remaining wishes, they will perish with you. As frightening as death might seem, remember: it contains within it the end of fear.
Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
Don’t twist yourself into a pretzel just to be liked. Be your fabulous self so the right people will love you. Trying to fit into someone else’s mold is like wearing shoes two sizes too small—painful & pointless. Embrace your flaws, flaunt your true self, & let your true colors shine like a disco ball. The right people will be drawn to your authentic self, & they’re the ones worth keeping. So, drop the act & be unapologetically you—because that’s where the real magic happens.
Life is Positive
Inspiration without action is pointless. Action without inspiration is senseless. Inspired action is what makes meaningful things happen
Anubhav Srivastava (Inspirational Sayings: Get Super Motivated and Achieve Amazing Success through Inspirational Sayings!)
Money without love is pointless.
R.J. Blacks (Alligator Park)
There is no place to run and hide, but they always run and hide. It is usually pointless to do, but they do have a point. It's a long path to go, but they make it seem shorter then it really is. When you try it; it seem like a life time, but when you finally reach there you seem to fade into the obis of the world. Then you restart in another body and another adventure.
Liliana Gomez-Rodriguez
As far as I can see the church in the United States will continue to decline. Our situation is a little like Judah’s in the late seventh century. The nearest I can get to an explanation of why I continue as a professor is that I have to do as Jeremiah did in that situation. I don’t imply that I think of myself as a kind of Jeremiah or that I am important in the way that Jeremiah was, but I appreciate the inspiration to faithfulness that he provides. I appreciate his example as someone who continued to teach and write, even though he suspected in the short term that it was pointless.
John E. Goldingay
Nothing is worth the damage of self-abuse. It solves no problem, accomplishes no goal, and helps no one. It has no benefit or productive value. It serves only one purpose: to make you feel bad, which doesn’t help you or anyone else. We are more likely to emotionally resign, mentally disengage, or stop trying when we feel bad about ourselves. It does not motivate or inspire us to do better; instead, it disempowers us from moving forward because we stop trusting ourselves to make the right choices. If it can be changed, fixed, or forgiven, then mentally abusing yourself is unnecessary. If it can’t be changed, fixed, or forgiven, then mentally abusing yourself is pointless. Offer yourself some compassion as you move through life. Of course you’re not going to have all the right answers. That’s how we learn. Don’t beat yourself up for a very human and very normal process.
Emily Maroutian (The Book of Relief: Passages and Exercises to Relieve Negative Emotion and Create More Ease in The Body)
Please don’t confuse random with spontaneous. Spontaneous rocks. It emerges from a field of probabilities that you control, maintaining choice and meaning. It involves instinct and urge, hunches and feelings, imagination and belief. Random implies the opposite. Empty and pointless. Maybe or maybe not. Chance and luck.
Mike Dooley (The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU: Answers to Inspire the Adventure of Your Life)
Nothing is ever perfect. There is always some good in the bad and some bad in the good. What is important is to know if the good can make up for the bad. Fight only for those things that matter. Because otherwise after a point the battle will seem pointless.
Mansi Soni
1) I may lose something today, I may get anything else tomorrow. But, I can never lose and ever get one thing and thats ‘YOU’ So, be my friend forever! 2) I CARE For U Bcoz You Are MY $weet……… friend for ever. 3) Each day i meet some one new, But never find another u..The world is full of ppl its true, Yet no one ever equals a friend like you.. 4) A best friend is one who never get tired ,of listening to your pointless drama over and over again ! 5) Best friends have CONVERSATION impossible to UNDERSTAND for others. 6) A good friend knows all your story , and a best friend has lived them with you. 7) BEST FRIEND knows , how stupid you are, but still choose to be with you . 8) BEST FRIENDS are like stars, you don’t always see them , but they are always there. 9) You are my BEST FRIEND , my HUMAN DIARY and my OTHER HALF , you mean the WORLD for me. 10) Best friends ,make the good time better and the hard times easier !! 11) When destiny forget , to tie some people in relationship,it corrects its mistake by making them your best friends .. 12) Best FRIENDS are like diamond , when you hit them they don’t break, they just slip away from your life. 13) When I die, friends would come at my funeral, good friends would cry for me , but my BEST FRIEND would change my Whatsapp status ” Chilling WITH Jesus ” 14) Weekly One Day Holiday, Monthly One Day Salary Day, Yearly One Day Birthday, Lifely One Day Death Day, But Sharing FRIENDSHIP with BEST FRIEND Is Every Day
Francesco Fauda
To say that color is waves of light and nothing more is pointless. Existence produces its own beauty for itself, and appreciates it by itself.
SEKIDA KATSUKI (ZA ZEN)
To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch—and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
The making of a ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius. For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yes somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not. // Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed ~sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer--you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. ... Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.
Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding)
Against this cultural backdrop, it’s not hard to understand why Banksy’s Dismaland was painted by its critics as naïve, reductive, repetitive, and deeply uncool, another act of ego-driven attention-seeking. Ben Luke of the London Evening Standard proclaimed that Banksy’s Dismaland was “mostly selfie-friendly stuff, momentarily arresting, quickly forgotten—art as clickbait.” Others emphasized its pointlessness. “[I]f Banksy has the money to make an entire theme park, WHY NOT JUST USE IT TO HELP PEOPLE!?” squawked John Trowbridge of The Huffington Post. Banksy could “fund a school in Africa” or “make a video encouraging the youth to be positive and engaged.” Has there ever been a more Disneyfied vision of what it takes to change the world? Ignore all the bad stuff out there and post a super-inspiring video to YouTube instead.
Heather Havrilesky (What If This Were Enough?: Essays)
Life is personal; nobody else can experience yours for you. And if you never lose your childlike spirit, you never give up on your big dreams, no matter how pointless this might seem to others.
Tunde Salami
Carter felt that pounding the table was pointless. Karin Ryan noticed that her boss had a quality of looking people in the eye and making them think he was their friend. “He can tell you to go to hell, and you think you’ll enjoy the trip,” Andrew Young recalled. “He has the ability to reach for the best in that person—an almost magical power to inspire someone by telling them, ‘You can make history.
Jonathan Alter (His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life)
Empty --- Dreams become struggles Hopes inspire motivation But when you realize Your dreams have crashed Your hopes have become empty Loneliness becomes exceeded Despairing hurts Life becomes pointless Tears come out From the eyes' barriers And years of life go by
Ehsan Sehgal
Sometimes I think that people are like stars or planets in the sky. Near each other, but unable to reach out and touch one another, even though they're sharing the same orbit. Spinning through the darkness so close together, they only see the outlines of unfamiliar figures. And they strain with all their might to reach each other, but gravity forces them into circle after circle of pointless motion in empty space.
Tatiana Vedenska (Why)
Therefore, a book written to try and shift the paradigm is pointless, because the storyteller that helps maintain the left-brain physical model can fill the holes with BS as fast as I can produce evidence. Moreover, this storyteller will stubbornly resist any rational assessment of proof. Gazzaniga highlighted the operation of this storyteller by working with epileptic patients where the 300 million connecting fibers between the two halves of the brain called the Corpus Callosum were cut to control seizures.
Grant Cameron (Inspired: The Paranormal World of Creativity)
Without depression and anxiety, I would not be who I am; a person who can see beauty and humour in the smallest and least likely of things; appreciating others kindness tenfold. When the black clouds of despair descend and life seems pointless I try to remember that one day in the future, perhaps this very day, a gentle breeze will blow the clouds away and allow the sunshine in. When that happens the world is a new and magical place and I wish to live forever.
Deena B. Chopra (Happiness 365: One-a-Day Inspirational Quotes for a Happy You)
Why would such amazing intelligence fumble around with such a pointless drill as having “children” in order to test, judge, and sentence them? The whole notion reeks of the immaturity, boredom, impatience, anger, contempt, sadism, and failure of the age it was crafted in, thousands of years ago at a very dark time in human history. Using this rationale to explain life, can you even think of one dot to connect that you’d have any confidence in? One reason divine intelligence would move in such a direction instead of the direction we’ve deduced where everyone is of God, doing their best, learning and growing and improving, forever and ever, in a dream world from which all return, unscathed but more for the adventure, adding to all that God is? As if God, the brilliance that started it all, that knew how to hang each star in the night’s sky and organize energy into matter, wasn’t also wise enough to rehabilitate everyone so in need. Big enough to forgive, unasked. Loving enough to refrain from tests, judgments, and sentences. Courageous enough to accept full responsibility for all creation. And great enough to be assured of unblemished success. In fact, the system now in place achieves all this and undoubtedly more, rehabilitating, forgiving, and loving automatically, perfectly dispensing the exact right doses of whatever is called for at the exact right time. It’s just that inquiring minds have not inquired enough, or rather, that they’ve left it for other folks to do—folks with agendas.
Mike Dooley (The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU: Answers to Inspire the Adventure of Your Life)
Being with Joshua felt right and good. He was everything stable, safe, secure. With him there were no agonizing waits or pointless heartaches. He was real, tangible, and right here in my arms.
Nicole Deese (Before I Called You Mine)
While they can certainly derive great pleasure from reflection and contemplation, there are times when they fatigue of thinking, feel they have reached a dead end, or just want to “get out of their own head.” When this occurs, INTPs may struggle to find meaningful alternatives. Since their purpose and identity often revolve around N pursuits, they may view S activities as essentially pointless or mundane. This can create a situation in which their happiness seems to hinge almost entirely on the success of their N affairs. And since periods of inspiration and N success are bound to ebb and flow, they may find themselves trapped in a sort of bipolar existence—ecstatic one moment, down and depressed the next.
A.J. Drenth (The INTP: Personality, Careers, Relationships, & the Quest for Truth and Meaning)
Dear Superwoman, Take back your power. You are not pointless. You are not helpless. You are not clueless and you are not careless. You just gave your heart to someone who did not realize your worth.
Gift Gugu Mona (Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman)
Dear Superwoman, Take back your power. You are not pointless. You are not helpless. You are not clueless and you are not careless. You just gave your heart to someone who did not realize your worth. Go back and fetch every single thread of your life! Do not settle for less while God has destined you for greatness.
Gift Gugu Mona (Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman)