Senselessness Quotes

“Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“Espere" in Spanish, is the one word covering two meanings: "waiting" and "hoping". If life, however, offers no expectation or prospect, waiting represents time "wasted”. Waiting needs a future. If not, time is condemned to be "killed". In the event that we are lost in a gap of boredom and despair, we are driven back in a vacuum of senselessness and deadlocked in a point of nothingness. We are, so therefore, bound to watch the agony of "time". ("Waiting for a place behind the geraniums " )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We must all be allowed our moments of insanity and senselessness. Without them, what sort of dull, lifeless creatures would we be?”
― Hannah Linder

“You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Hypnos

“(On WWI:)

A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ...

A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.

The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.

But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ...

He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.

He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.

But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“What is it about me that threatens them so much they would rather see carnage like this than just let me live my life?", Celestra Caine in FADE by Kailin Gow”
― Kailin Gow, Fade

“To talk about the senselessness of the battle was to attribute sense to war itself.”
― Sten Nadolny, Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit

“We make junk, we consume junk and we are junk.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things. Nothing compares, even oblivion is a sweet dream. You understand why, of course. Why this peculiar threat. These brooding psyches, all the busy minds everywhere. I hear them buzzing like flies in the blackness. I see them as glow worms flitting in the blackness. They are struggling, straining every second to keep the sky above them, to keep the sun in the sky, to keep the dead in the earth-to keep all things, so to speak, where they belong. What an undertaking! What a crushing task! Is it any wonder that they are all tempted by a universal vice, that in some dark street of the mind a single voice whispers to one and all, softly hissing, and says: 'Lay down your burden.' Then thoughts begin to drift, a mystical magnetism pulls them this way and that, faces start to change, shadows speak... sooner or later the sky comes down, melting like wax. But as you know, everything has not yet been lost: absolute terror has proved its security against this fate. Is it any wonder that these beings carry on the struggle at whatever cost?”
― Thomas Ligotti, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works

“Hard-hearted shouldn't need senses.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“I nodded, unsure if Ted sounded admiring or angry. 'I waded in but I couldn't find him. I mean, is it possible - the water wasn't deep enough for him to drown. It doesn't make any sense.'

'My band made four brilliant albums and never had a single goddamn hit. We were supposed to be the American Rolling Stones, and we couldn't get more than five minutes of airplay. Does that make sense?' Ted stubbed out his cigarette.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Radiant Days

“Saying it ain’t fair, over and over again while you stand in front of a wrecking ball is kinda senseless, I think.”
― Dan Groat, An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy

“The thing that give me the mos' trouble was, it didn' make no sense. You don't look for no sense when lightnin' kills a cow, or it comes up a flood. That's jus' the way things is. But when a bunch of men take an' lock you up four years, it ought to have some meaning. Men is supposed to think things out. Here they put me in, an' keep me an feed me four years. That ought to either make me so I won't do her again or else punish me so I'll be afraid to do her again"- he paused- "but if Herb or anybody else come for me, I'd do her again. Do her before I could figure her out. Specially if I was drunk. That sort of senselessness kind a worries a man.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“You can’t fix every fool. You can’t always get others to change themselves forthwith, either, especially the stubborn and the senseless ones. Sometimes you can only wait for the rain to pour and deplete them of denseness.”
― Picazo Basha, Shambala Sect

“Ah! listen the song of storm from my disturbed soul;and it scatters flower buds into its lonely halls;like every pain needs a dirge,with wreaths that awful the world framed one for me,and gives the time it calls.”
― Nithin Purple, Venus and Crepuscule

“Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Sarajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more.”
― A.A. Milne, Peace with Honour

“Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.”
― Francis M. Nevins Jr., The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“Humility adds lessons to our pain and suffering, turning the seemingly senseless into meaning.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“His urbane brain cut the most magnificent capers, as, chloroformed by fatigue, it directed its incoming perceptions along the most absurd paths and enjoyed the utter senselessness of its associations.”
― Gerhard Roth, The Will To Sickness

“When you realize you cannot eat or drink money, the pursuit of it becomes senseless.”
― Robert Black

“A random act of violence," his mother called it. "A totally senseless thing." Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is random and senseless place.”
― Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

“The people's need to share has turned into a massive disease. It has taken them to the most private meaningless part of their lives. In such circumstance, values become redefined and what has been worthless in the past, has become the core value of the new age.
The disaster starts where the essence of the discourse changes. The modern age, with all its technological advances, has taken human to the fast fall. We are going down faster than being trapped into a mire. The transition of the discourse has also given us a great gift, senselessness. Therefore, we have transitioned into piles of senseless machines, drained of human essentiality and drowning into a giant mire. The sad part is, due to the lack of true sense, we don't even feel it. Our only safety guard, which is entirely absurd and phantasmagoric, comes from following the majority of the world's population. As long as we feel belonged to preponderancy, our nonsense will absolutely make sense.”
― Kambiz Shabankare

“Do not endorse your senselessness, to click like or leave comments, for anything without looking and reading that.”
― Ehsan Sehgal