Futile

He enjoyed being back on the air, and some of the fierce helplessness of the futile fight against the Second Foundation left him in the excitement of another sort of fight with substantial ships and ordinary men.

There is but one among the redeemed that would do it; and it is futile to hope that that one has not already done it—Joan of Arc.

But if you decide that you have seen enough destruction, enough futile suffering, then open the jar.

He is really telling us, of course, how futile it is to write or read histories.

They spoke of how the woman had wept and begged, of the desperate way she clung to her garments when she was commanded to disrobe, of her futile efforts to cover her breasts and her sex with her hands as she hobbled barefoot and naked through the streets to exile.

And again in a futile struggle with reality her mother, refusing to believe that she could live when her beloved boy was killed in the bloom of life, escaped from reality into a world of delirium.

They say they need only sit inside their defenses while you wear yourselves out in futile attack.” “In a word,” Paul said, “they’re immobilized.” “While you can go where you will,” Gurney said.

One Saturday night he did not come home, and thereafter all their efforts to get trace of him were futile.

Asked if there was some other place you could stay.” Kimberly sat on her seedy couch in her debris-littered living room, her eyes lusterless again now that she had ceased the futile effort of trying to explain her situation to the investigating officer.

“Your efforts are futile.

In a few minutes, through all the doors, down all the staircases, by every exit, everyone hastened to retire, or rather to fly; for it was a situation where the ordinary condolences—which even the best friends are so eager to offer in great catastrophes—were seen to be utterly futile.

There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall, when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the jaws of the waves like a fisherman’s hook in the jaws of a pike, when those monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars, which the hurricane bears forth into the void and into night, when all that power and all that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which are superior.

Will you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile knowledge?

I do not affirm that what you see beyond is futile, I do not advise you to stop, I do not say leadings you thought great are not great, But I say that none lead to greater than these lead to.

I take one futile step in her direction when I hear the cannon blast, know her heart has stopped, that she is dead.

It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed.

New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989: 'Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed.

His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why.

She made me promise there would be no conventional funeral “with a preacher’s sermon and my body on display.” As she said: “I will not be in that body then but it deserves more dignity than such a display provides.” She insisted I go no further than to have her cremated and scatter her ashes at her beloved Kawaloa “where I have felt so much peace and love.” The only ceremony—friends and loved ones to watch the scattering of her ashes during the singing of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” She knew there would be tears then as there are tears while I write these words but in her last days she often spoke of tears as futile.

It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practised it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn’t much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children who would rear children.

It is, indeed, quite futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or other physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms of life throughout the world, under the most different climates.

They spoke of how the woman had wept and begged, of the desperate way she clung to her garments when she was commanded to disrobe, of her futile efforts to cover her breasts and her sex with her hands as she hobbled barefoot and naked through the streets to exile.

He was no fool though, though a futile idler; he was curiously clever at all kinds of things that couldn’t be the slightest use; a sort of impromptu conjuring; making fifteen matches set fire to each other like a regular firework; or cutting a banana or some such thing into a dancing doll.

What they had never talked about, he now told him of, of his walk to the city, at that time, of the burning wound, of his envy at the sight of happy fathers, of his knowledge of the foolishness of such wishes, of his futile fight against them.

The opposition of the nobles was futile; the men who had made Spain a great nation were powerless now against the combined forces of stupidity and fanaticism that were undoing their work.

Major Major had bought the dark glasses and false mustache in Rome in a final, futile attempt to save himself from the swampy degradation into which he was steadily sinking.

He likewise forfeits to the king, all his lands, goods and chattels, is declared an alien in every respect, and is put out of the king’s protection.1234 It is unnecessary, I imagine, to observe, how contrary such regulations are to the boasted liberty of the subject, of which we affect to be so very jealous; but which, in this case, is so plainly sacrificed to the futile interests of our merchants and manufacturers.