Pointless Motivational Quotes

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Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
It was pointless to worry about problems I didn't yet have.
Eugenia Kim (The Calligrapher's Daughter)
Running a race assigns a point to a sport that often feels very pointless. It's an exuberant payoff to months of tedium. It's a way of crafting an end boss for a particularly cumbersome video game. It's a fun, monstrous reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. So, do yourself a favor: go build a monster.
Matthew Inman (The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances (Volume 5) (The Oatmeal))
At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.
Cheryl Strayed (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail)
I don’t think of you as a typical beauty. I never once did. To me your hair mimics asphalt more than the lustrous feathers of ravens. Comparing your eyes to heavenly lights seems a stretch when they are the common color of dirt. I can’t imagine you as a tall, pole-slender image; your God-given shape is right bulky. But I never cared about such pointless things anyway. What good have trivial attributes ever done the world? When I look at you, I see you—or in other words, all of you that really matters. I see a kind heart and compassionate arms. I see a patient, gentle spirit abounding with love towards all of God’s creatures. I see the perfect blend of humility and strength of character. I see a wise intellect as well as an endearing sense of humor. I see all the qualities that make you the person I love, regardless of the bodily package you’re bound in. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re beautiful, because I find you to be far superior to that worthless and pointless nonsense the world calls beauty.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
All the wealth in the world is nothing, pointless - of no true value - if you yourself feel worthless.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
If a worker’s motivation is slumping, it’s probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
Someone assigned a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment. Why? Because every fiber of their genuine being fights against that necessity.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
The key is to keep the focus on people's actions, on their behaviors, rather than speculate about their motives. Trying to determine what's in a person's head or heart is a pointless distraction. It's impossible to know for certain the heart's inner secrets.
Carl L. Hart (Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear)
By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation. To give dinner-parties, to travel, to have carriages, titles, and slavishly devoted servants is considered such a necessity that, in order to satisfy this need, people will even sacrifice their lives, honour, and sense of humanity, and if they cannot satisfy it, they will even commit suicide.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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)
Quite a few people became depressed once the crime was solved. It seemed so pointless. If the culprit had at least had a strong motive, it might have been easier to understand. Once it was all over, people felt as if they had been left in limbo. Yes, they did. Many people expressed doubt as to whether the man who committed suicide really was the culprit.
Riku Onda (The Aosawa Murders)
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
By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation. To give dinner-parties, to travel, to have carriages, titles, and slavishly devoted servants is considered such a necessity that, in order to satisfy this need, people will even sacrifice their lives, honour, and sense of humanity, and if they cannot satisfy it, they will even commit suicide. The
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Karamazov Brothers)
That this will is blind means only that it has no further end than the mere perpetuation of existence- and bare existence, contrasted with existing for something, is the essence of meaninglessness. This fact eludes us so long as we have great designs and pruposes to claim our attention; we assume that these motivate us, and do not consider that they are themselves the arbitrary product of a will that has no design or purpose. This pointlessness of life, even of life that is filled with striving and achievement, becomes particularly apparent when we contemplate the vast panorama of non-human life, see the restless determination with which it is pursued, and then inquire into the purpose of it all.
Arthur Schopenhauer (The Will to Live: Selected Writings)
Revenge. I swear, is there a more pointless, destructive, unsatisfying motive in all the world?
Joe Abercrombie (Best Served Cold)
Apart from the love of Christ, lesser motivations leave our Christian walk and service both empty and pointless. We find ourselves aimlessly repeating religious routines and offering sentimental sacrifices that amount to nothing but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals (1 Corinthians 13:1). A loveless Christian life is no life at all.
Paul Chappell (Sacred Motives: 10 Reasons To Wake Up Tomorrow and Live for God)
before you can be truly motivated to reimagine a new world, you have to totally lose faith in the old one.
Wendy Syfret (The Sunny Nihilist: A Declaration of the Pleasure of Pointlessness)
Ehsan Sehgal Quotes about Media — — — * Words matter and mirror if your head is a dictionary of insight and your feelings are alive. * Sure, fake news catches and succeeds attention, but for a while; however, it embraces disregard and unreliability forever. * Media rule the incompetent minds and pointless believers. * A real journalist only states, neither collaborates nor participates. * The majority of journalists and anchors have the information only but not the sense of knowledge. * When the media encourages and highlights the wrong ones, anti-democratic figures, criminals in uniform, and dictators in a supreme authority and brilliant context, sure, such a state never survives the breakdown of prosperity and civil rights, as well as human rights. Thus, the media is accountable and responsible for this as one of the democratic pillars. *Media cannot be a football ground or a tool for anyone. It penetrates the elementary pillar of a state, it forms and represents the language of entire humanity within its perception of love, peace, respect, justice, harmony, and human rights, far from enmity and distinctions. Accordingly, it demonstrates its credibility and neutrality. * When the non-Western wrongly criticizes and abuses its culture, religion, and values, the Western media highlights that often, appreciating in all dimensions. However, if the same one even points out only such subjects, as a question about Western distinctive attitude and role, the West flies and falls at its lowest level, contradicting its principles of neutrality and freedom of press and speech, which pictures, not only double standards but also double dishonesty with itself and readers. Despite that, Western media bother not to realize and feel ignominy and moral and professional stigma. * Social Media has become the global dustbin of idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone is there to separate and recycle that. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean to constitute insulting, abusing, and harming deliberately in a distinctive and discriminative feature and context, whereas supporting such notions and attempts is a universal crime. * Social media is a place where you share your favourite poetry, quotes, songs, news, social activities, and reports. You can like something, you can comment, and you can use humour in a civilised way. It is social media, but it is not a place to love or be loved. Any lover does not exist here, and no one is serious in this regard. Just enjoy yourself and do not try to fool anyone. If you do that, it means you are making yourself a fool; it is a waste of time, and it is your defeat too. * I use social media only to devote and denote my thoughts voluntarily for the motivation of knowledge, not to earn money as greedy-minded. * One should not take seriously the Social-Media fools and idiots. * Today, on social media, how many are on duty? * Journalists voluntarily fight for human rights and freedom of speech, whereas they stay silent for their rights and journalistic freedom on the will and restrictions of the boss of the media. Indeed, it verifies that The nearer the church, the farther from god. * The abuse, insult, humiliation, and discrimination against whatever subject is not freedom of expression and writing; it is a violation and denial of global harmony and peace. * Press freedom is one significant pillar of true democracy pillars, but such democracy stays deaf, dumb, and blind, which restricts or represses the media. * Press and speech that deliberately trigger hatred and violation fall not under the freedom of press and speech since restrictions for morale and peace apply to everyone without exemption. * Real press freedom is just a dream, which nowhere in the world becomes a reality; however, journalists stay dreaming that.
Ehsan Sehgal
Why Long Term Goal Setting is Largely Pointless. Desires change, motivations change. What you wanted the most in high school is probably not what you wanted the most 10 years after that. In high school, being popular with the opposite sex and trying to look cool was probably the number one priority. After ten years, the number one priority is to probably get a good job or have a stable income. And if you have that, to find the right relationship for life. Twenty years after high school, it is probably to see your Kids do well in school and so on. Having a dream that you desire with the same extreme intensity as you desired it when you were 16 is possible but uncommon. Most of the times, you will realize that you probably don’t desire it after twenty or if you do, you probably don’t care AS much as you used to. How can a fire keep on raging once the fuel is burnt up? How can anything be accomplished if the burning desire to achieve it is no longer there after a long stretch of time? And there is nothing wrong with wanting something else after twenty years. That’s human nature. You don’t have to keep slogging on for something that you don’t care about. The point is this is why super long term individualistic goals can sometimes get vague and pointless because you may realize midway that you don’t even care about them anymore.
Anubhav Srivastava (UnLearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life (What They Don't Want You to Know Book 1))
I have a shameful confession to make: Secretly, I am not lazy. I’ve learned that if I do literally nothing for more than a year, two at most, I start to get depressed. I’m not recanting my old manifesto. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back. But once I become genuinely engaged in a project, I can become fanatically absorbed, spending hundreds of hours on it, no matter how useless and unremunerative. As a teacher, I edit my students’ writing with a nit-picking precision and big-picture ambition they may likely never experience again. And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels. It’s no coincidence that so many social movements arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them. ("It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam", The New York Times)
Tim Kreider
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!)
All our actions, if not motivated by love, are pointless
Sunday Adelaja
Often when we connect with our values, we realise that we’ve been neglecting them for a long time and this can be very painful. But remember, this is not an excuse to beat yourself up! (‘What a hypocrite I am! I say I value doing all these different things, yet I’m not doing any of them! I’m pathetic!’) All of us lose touch with our values from time to time. Dwelling on those times is pointless because there’s nothing we can do to change the past. What’s important is to connect with our values here and now and to use them to guide and motivate our current actions. So if your mind does start beating up on you, simply thank it.
Russ Harris (The Happiness Trap: Stop Struggling, Start Living)
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)
In fact, the Nazis did not have a euthanasia program, in the proper sense of the word. Their so-called euthanasia program was not motivated by concern for the suffering of those killed. If it had been, they would not have kept their operations secret, deceived relatives about the cause of death of those killed, or exempted from the program certain privileged classes, such as veterans of the armed services or relatives of the euthanasia staff. Nazi ‘euthanasia’ was never voluntary and often was involuntary rather than nonvoluntary. ‘Doing away with useless mouths’ – a phrase used by those in charge – gives a better idea of the objectives of the program than ‘mercy-killing’. Both racial origin and ability to work were among the factors considered in the selection of patients to be killed. It was the Nazi belief in the importance of maintaining a pure Aryan Volk – a quasi-mystical racist concept that was thought of as more important than mere individuals’ lives – that made both the so-called euthanasia program and later the entire holocaust possible. Proposals for the legalization of euthanasia, on the other hand, are based on respect for autonomy and the goal of avoiding pointless suffering.
Peter Singer (Practical Ethics)
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
So, when I see that somebody doesn’t care about a particular goal—whether it’s becoming financially independent, finishing a degree, or even voting—I find myself wondering, Why does this activity seem pointless to them? According to James, he and his peers didn’t take classwork seriously because their school was overly strict. That makes complete sense to me. When you feel stuck in a controlling environment where nobody treats you with trust, you’re naturally going to want to rebel against it. Of course it’s hard for a teenager to self-motivate when they’ve had adults telling them what to do and how to do it all their lives!
Devon Price (Laziness Does Not Exist)
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
As a society, we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time. We privilege autonomy, and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology, and discover that the average working day is longer than ever, and that we have less time than we had before. The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends should be, or whether there is purpose in anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash: they promptly crash. We are so eager that all scientific research result in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian, in order to get value for money, and thus render it pointless and, in this form, certainly a waste of resource. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricula and focussing on exam results to the point where free-thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged; in our universities many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically; and their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude. We over-sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection; we over-use antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill; we make drugs illegal to protect society, and, while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs, create a fertile field for crime; we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with – let alone relish – uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable. The left hemisphere’s motivation is control; and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions
Iain McGilchrist (The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World)
Killing "for sport" is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself ... [but] the killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, "Something that wanted to live is dead. There is that much less vitality, consciousness, and, perhaps, joy in the universe. I am the Spirit that Denies.
Joseph Wood Krutch (The Great Chain of Life)
These experts sought to promote the idea, which culminated after 9/11 in the War on Terror, that the West was up against enemies of such unfathomable evil that engaging with their causes or motivations was pointless, and that virtually anything the national security state did to combat them, including a dramatic rise in civilian deaths, was justified. To the millions of people whom it impacted - Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Africans of secular background or various faiths - the terrorism paradigm created a painful double existence. Those who believed that, in many instances, violence committed in their countries of origin stemmed from legitimate grievances - that the violence was not legitimate, but the underlying pathologies and grievances were - felt themselves unable to acknowledge this in public life.
Azadeh Moaveni (Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS)
For starters, they’ve assumed that people who are raised to believe they’re basically competent have no reason to accomplish anything. I once heard someone defend that belief by declaring that “human nature is to do as little as necessary.” This prejudice is refuted not just by a few studies but by the entire branch of psychology dealing with motivation.16 Normally, it’s hard to stop happy, satisfied people from trying to learn more about themselves and the world, or from trying to do a job of which they can feel proud. The desire to do as little as possible is an aberration, a sign that something is wrong. It may suggest that someone feels threatened and therefore has fallen back on a strategy of damage control, or that rewards and punishments have caused that individual to lose interest in what he’s doing, or that he perceives a specific task—perhaps correctly—as pointless and dull.
Alfie Kohn (Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason)
do what I know I need to do. Please know that depression takes away my desire. It takes away what we call “motivation,” and it takes away my ability to even see a reason for moving forward. This is what stops me from working. It’s not laziness. It’s not lack of desire to move forward. It’s an inability to get my body to take action when my brain tells me it is pointless to try anything. I need your help reminding me that I don’t have to want to do something in order to get something done. You can ask me this: “Are you having one of those days where you’re just hoping and waiting for motivation to show up but it won’t?” If I say “yes,” I then give you permission to remind me that I can choose a project and simply move forward, even when it’s painful. You can remind me of this until the project is done. I promise to listen.
Julie A. Fast (Getting It Done When You're Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track)
No incident can silence you other than death. So it's pointless to stop before death.
Akshmala Sharma
Songwriter Ellie Greenwich laughed at the idea that they wrote about their own lives. “We wouldn’t do that,” she said. These songwriters were not self-conscious artists exploring their inner lives. They operated under an industrial mandate. Their music’s appeal was designed to sell records; any self-serving “artistic” motives were pointless. Under such strictures, however, these men and women made magnificent music, these glorious records, filled with imagination, wonder and beauty.
Joel Selvin (Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues)