Fruitless Quotes

1. "How weak and fruitless must be any word of mine."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

2. "Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour."
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

3. "I've lived to bury my desiresand see my dreams corrode with rustnow all that's left are fruitless firesthat burn my empty heart to dust.Struck by the clouds of cruel fateMy crown of Summer bloom is sereAlone and sad, I watch and waitAnd wonder if the end is near.As conquered by the last cold airWhen Winter whistles in the windAlone upon a branch that's bareA trembling leaf is left behind."
Author: Alexander Pushkin

4. "Oh yet we trust that somehow goodWill be the final goal of ill,To pangs of nature, sins of will,Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;That nothing walks with aimless feet;That not one life shall be destroy'd,Or cast as rubbish to the void,When God hath made the pile complete;That not a worm is cloven in vain;That not a moth with vain desireIs shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,Or but subserves another's gain.Behold, we know not anything;I can but trust that good shall fallAt last—far off—at last, to all,And every winter change to spring.So runs my dream: but what am I?An infant crying in the night:An infant crying for the light:And with no language but a cry."
Author: Alfred Tennyson

5. "Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;Thou art fed with perpetual breath, and alive after infinite changes,And fresh from the kisses of death,Of langours rekindled and rallied, Of barren delights and unclean,Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallidAnd poisonous queen."
Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne

6. "Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do.The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that--the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love."
Author: Amin Maalouf

7. "You can easily see what and endless, wearisome and fruitless task it would be if I were to refute all the unconsidered objections of people who pigheadly contradict everything I say."
Author: Augustine Of Hippo

8. "How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose..! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation."
Author: Augustine Of Hippo

9. "All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them."
Author: Bacon

10. "Hakeem: A wise man once said that suffering produces perseverance, character; and character, hope.Andre: Since when did spouting masochism make one wise? And the sacraments of a bitter existence? Who deemed that a vaunted prize? Nihilistic philosophy only births more pain. It's fruitless to espouse folly, repackage it as wisdom, and spew it in a wise man's name."
Author: Booker T. Mattison

11. "Men are in a restless pursuit after satisfaction in earthly things. They will exhaust themselves in the deceitful delights of sin, and, finding them all to be vanity and emptiness, they will become very perplexed and disappointed. But they will continue their fruitless search. Though wearied, they still stagger forward under the influence of spiritual madness, and though there is no result to be reached except that of everlasting disappointment, yet they press forward. They have no forethought for their eternal state; the present hour absorbs them. They turn to another and another of earth's broken cisterns, hoping to find water where not a drop was ever discovered yet."
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon

12. "These struggles with the natural character, the strong native bent of the heart, may seem futile and fruitless, but in the end they do good. They tend, however slightly, to give the actions, the conduct, that turn wich Reason approves, and whic Feeling, perharps, too ofter opposes: they certainly make a difference in the general tenor of a life, and certainly make a difference in the general tenor of a life, and enable it to be better regulated, mofe equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

13. "Is that the summit of earthly happiness, the end of life - to love? I don't think it is. It may be the extreme of mortal misery, it may be sheer waste of time, and fruitless torture of feeling."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

14. "The past is but an untraceable footfallIt appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.It's often dark and ruthless.It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectationsAnd our shattered dreams It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.It wrecks our present and ruins our futureAnd thus should be left where it is meant to beIt should be left behind …"
Author: Chirag Tulsiani

15. "Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate."
Author: Claire Messud

16. "It turns out that indecision is a path itself; but figuratively, a vertical path - up or down - meaning it isn't always a fruitless path. One is forgotten, but the other is glorified. To be what they call 'middle-of-the-road' in most cases just means you have a hard time figuring out who between options is dumber. So quite often those who refused to decide were, after all, the bold individuals, the influential ones, the creative ones, those who snatched their own authority."
Author: Criss Jami

17. "Just so you know, this is the last time I ever trust you," I say. "But you're so cute all covered in snow." "Shut up and help me find my ski." We search through the powder for a while, but don't locate my missing ski. After ten fruitless minutes I'm convinced that the mountain has eaten it."
Author: Cynthia Hand

18. "Summer makes me suicidal. It sucks all the magick out of life, and even sleeping becomes an exercise in fruitless brutality. I cannot comprehend what it is in the souls who await this misery. Nothing worthwhile can survive the heat. The birds and the bees are harbingers of hell, ushering in a season of disease. There is nothing in these months that speaks to me. It conspires to keep me from ever reaching home."
Author: Damien Echols

19. "It is through the tender austerity of our troubles that the Son of Man comes knocking. In every event He seeks an entrance to my heart, yes, even in my most helpless, futile, fruitless moments. The very cracks and empty crannies of my life, my perplexities and hurts and botched-up jobs, He wants to fill with Himself, His joy, His life...He urges me to learn of Him: 'I am gentle and humble in heart."
Author: Elisabeth Elliot

20. "I resolved to break the barren soil of my fruitless brain."
Author: Elizabeth Grymeston

21. "As a flower that is lovely and beautiful, but is scentless, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who practices it not."
Author: Gautama Buddha

22. "The child (mis)recognizes itself as a whole entity for the first time. It sees an image of itself as a unified person, an image which promises for the child that it will soon achieve full co-ordination of its body. The incoherent ‘hommelette' sees an image of itself as an independent being and learns to identify with this image. This is when the ego (the sense of yourself as an individual) is formed. Thus, your sense of self is fundamentally bound up with an ‘exterior' image. Instead of simply coming from within, your identity is formed out of a situation in which you see yourself for the first time from the outside. For Lacan this means that alienation and division are built into your identity from the outset. The result in adult life is that you are in a constant but fruitless state of desire for some mythical inner unity and stability to match the unity and stability you thought you saw in your childhood reflection. We spend our lives trying (and failing) to make ourselves ‘whole'."
Author: Glenn Ward

23. "The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics."
Author: Harper Lee

24. "I passed two idle days, watching fruitlessly.I took to my hasty pacing to and fro again and succeeded, not without difficulty, in gaining a few days of respite, in making myself forget for a while. I dwelt within these walls quiet in a feverish sort of way and inactive as a prisoner. I walked up and down my room a great part of the day, attracted by the opening in the wall and not daring to go away to a distance from it again.The long hours went by, and in the evening I was worn out by my indefatigable hope."
Author: Henri Barbusse

25. "But to unite in a permanent religious institution which is not to be subject to doubt before the public even in the lifetime of one man, and thereby to make a period of time fruitless in the progress of mankind toward improvement, thus working to the disadvantage of posterity - that is absolutely forbidden. For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind."
Author: Immanuel Kant

26. "Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen."
Author: Iris Murdoch

27. "Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs."
Author: Jack Lynch

28. "Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love themAnd to know that they are the wounds that make love real.His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.I do not splash in the blood of his sonnor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.I am a boy again--I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,I, too--and together the bread and I embrace,Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality."
Author: James Kavanaugh

29. "But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries."
Author: Jane Smiley

30. "When nothing worked, he decided the least he could do was pick the yam bits out of his beard. But even the proved fruitless since the bits seemed to find their way into the deepest recesses of the beard, and the just small enough boy quickly grew squeamish. Judge if you must, but if you've ever had to pick yam bits out of an old man's bushy beard, I'm sure you'd forgive him."
Author: Jason Carter Eaton

31. "Life without God is a long and fruitless search for enjoyment, meaning, and fulfillment."
Author: Jim George

32. "Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not."
Author: John Dewey

33. "A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
Author: John Steinbeck

34. "And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth."
Author: Kahlil Gibran

35. "If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind."
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe

36. "The leaves do fad and fall away, / Berries rot and sheaves decay; / The deer is fled back to the field. / That is all your promises yield. / All wind and words, your vows, I see, / Are barren as the fruitless tree."
Author: Lauren Willig

37. "Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world."
Author: Mary Balogh

38. "Their useless torches on dry hedges throw,That catch the flames, and kindle all the row;So burns the God, consuming in desire,And feeding in his breast a fruitless fire"
Author: Ovid

39. "Avoid trivial pursuits. You are a child of God, destined for glory, and called to do great things in His Name. Do not waste your life on hobbies, sports, and other recreational pursuits. Do not throw away the precious moments of your life on entertainment, movies, and video games. Though some of these things can properly have a 'small place' in the Christian's life, we must be careful not to give undue attention to temporal and fruitless activities. Do not waste your life. Employ the time of your youth in developing the character and skills necessary to be a useful servant of God."
Author: Paul David Washer

40. "If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it's fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart..."
Author: Pema Chödrön

41. "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"
Author: Rasheed Ogunlaru

42. "The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove."
Author: Samuel Johnson

43. "He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own dispositions will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove"
Author: Samuel Johnson

44. "Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind's pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality."
Author: Sarah Silverman

45. "In the opinion of this researcher, a great many of the people who have researched the Carrie White matter - either for the scientific journals or for the popular press - have placed a mistaken emphasis on a relatively fruitless search for incidents of telekinesis in the girl's childhood. To strike a rough analogy, this is like spending years researching the early incidents of masturbation in a rapist's childhood."
Author: Stephen King

46. "A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil."
Author: Terry Eagleton

47. "I nearly committed a terrible sin," said Brutha. "I nearly ate fruit on a fruitless day.""That's a terrible thing, a terrible thing," said Om. "Now cut the melon."
Author: Terry Pratchett

48. "Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection."
Author: Vironika Tugaleva

49. "I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny , as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless."
Author: Yukio Mishima

50. "Isn't better to excel in your work than wasting time on fruitless things ... after all to become the history, you have to write it."
Author: Zeeshan Ahmed

Fruitless Quotes Pictures