Ennui Quotes

The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We lack strength to endure the least task, being incapable of suffering pain, powerless to enjoy pleasure, impatient with everything. How many invoke death when, after having tried every sort of change, they find themselves reverting to the same sensations, unable to discover any new experience.

Thus people--so it seems to me-- Become good friends from sheer ennui.

Ennui is the desire of activity without the fit means of gratifying the desire.

If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.

Ennui and lethargy are waging a war inside me.

I wouldn't wish my consort to suffer ennui.

Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother.

The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.

I do pity unlearned gentlemen on a rainy day.

Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

I love nothing and that is the true cause of my ennui.

Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty.

Gossip, like ennui, is born of idleness.

You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.

As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds.

I do not care for anything. I do not care to ride, for the exercise is too violent. I do not care to walk, walking is too strenuous. I do not care to lie down, for I should either have to remain lying, and I do not care to do that, or I should have to get up again, and I do not care to do that either. Summa summarum: I do not care at all.

If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself.

Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

The gloomy and the resentful are always found among those who have nothing to do or who do nothing.

I am tired of looking on what is, One might as well see beauty never more, As look upon it with an empty eye. I would this world were over. I am tired.

I am wrapped in dismal thinking.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

Ennui, the parent of expensive and ruinous vices.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured-disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui-in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.

... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui.

One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.

Like faith, marriage is a mystery. The person you're committed to spending your life with is known and yet unknown, at the same time remarkably intimate and necessarily other. The classic seven-year itch may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit to the relationship or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.

This ennui, for which we Saxons had no name,--this word of France, has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

Ennui is the disease of hearts without feeling, and of minds without resources.

If you want to live in 'white world,' if you want to experience the stultifying boredom and penetrating ennui that homogeneity can bring, you can go to Canada any day of the year. It's an entire country named Doug.

I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.

Pressing his thumb down on her jaw to part her lips, he kissed her again, angel dust glittering in the air. "Mmm." She rubbed against him. "Did you make a change to your special blend?" Angel dust, he'd told her, was normally rich and exquisite, but not sexual. Elena had only ever tasted Raphael's blend, and it was always oh-so-sexual-today, it also held a dangerous bite. Kisses down her throat. "I wouldn't wish my consort to suffer ennui.

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.

After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

We are amused through the intellect, but it is the heart that saves us from ennui.

The victims of ennui paralyze all the grosser feelings by excess, and torpify all the finer by disuse and inactivity. Disgusted with this world, and indifferent about another, they at last lay violent hands upon themselves, and assume no small credit for the sang froid with which they meet death. But, alas! such beings can scarcely be said to die, for they have never truly lived.

In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.

Gaming has been resorted to by the affluent as a refuge from ennui. It is a mental dram, and may succeed for a moment; but, like all other stimuli, it produces indirect debility.

Philosophy may raise us above grandeur, but nothing can elevate us above the ennui which accompanies it.

That which renders life burdensome to us generally arises from the abuse of it.