Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.

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Futility

  • An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

  • There is no irritant as painful as an ace up your sleeve that you can never use; it's the kind of thing that causes oysters to produce pearls.

  • You can keep on chewing gum for ten hours, but after about a minute and a half you've got all the good out of it.

    • Twyla Tharp,
    • in Barbara McDowell and Hana Umlauf, Woman's Almanac ()
  • Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.

  • How long do I try to get water from a stone? / It's like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

  • She can't win if she's not at the table ...

  • Alas! why were we born to woe and bliss / If life had no more need of us than this?

  • He saw lying behind him the whole futility of his life; it seemed to him now like a mumbled string of meaningless prayers, a foolish litany which ended in the priest falling asleep.

  • You can't make soufflé rise twice.

  • ... you must not use wood to put out the fire.

  • Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.

    • Coco Chanel,
    • in Karen Karbo, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons From the World's Most Elegant Woman ()