Quotes4study

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

William Styron

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

Kenneth Clark

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

Friedrich Nietzsche (date of death

I would rather die of passion than of boredom

Vincent van Gogh

I’m dying of boredom,” Howl said pathetically. “Or maybe just dying.

Diana Wynne Jones

Law of Procrastination:

    Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has

    the feeling that there is nothing important to do.

Fortune Cookie

Watch Rincewind.

Look at him.  Scrawny, like most wizards, and clad in a dark red robe on

which a few mystic sigils were embroidered in tarnished sequins. Some might

have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his

master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for

heterosexuality.  Yet around his neck was a chain bearing the bronze octagon

that marked him as an alumnus of Unseen University, the high school of magic

whose time-and-space transcendent campus is never precisely Here or There.

Graduates were usually destined for mageship at least, but Rincewind--after

an unfortunate event--had left knowing only one spell and made a living of

sorts around the town by capitalizing on an innate gift for languages.  He

avoided work as a rule, but had a quickness of wit that put his

acquaintances in mind of a bright rodent.

        -- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

Fortune Cookie

Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom.  The first is being a bore.

        -- Cecil Beaton

Fortune Cookie

All this big deal about white collar crime -- what's WRONG with white collar

crime?  Who enjoys his job today?  You?  Me?  Anybody?  The only satisfying

part of any job is coffee break, lunch hour and quitting time.  Years ago

there was at least the hope of improvement -- eventual promotion -- more

important jobs to come.  Once you can be sold the myth that you may make

president of the company you'll hardly ever steal stamps.  But nobody

believes he's going to be president anymore.  The more people change jobs

the more they realize that there is a direct connection between working for

a living and total stupefying boredom.  So why NOT take revenge?  You're not

going to find ME knocking a guy because he pads an expense account and his

home stationery carries the company emblem.  Take away crime from the white

collar worker and you will rob him of his last vestige of job interest.

        -- J. Feiffer

Fortune Cookie

In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom.

It is not always an easy sacrifice.

Fortune Cookie

Fifth Law of Procrastination:

    Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that

    there is nothing important to do.

Fortune Cookie

First Law of Procrastination:

    Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility

    for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who

    imposed the deadline).

Fifth Law of Procrastination:

    Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that

    there is nothing important to do.

Fortune Cookie

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the

system from within.  I'm coming now I'm coming to reward them.  First

we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens.  I'm guided by this birthmark on

my skin.  I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons.  First we take Manhattan,

then we take Berlin.

I'd really like to live beside you, baby.  I love your body and your spirit

and your clothes.  But you see that line there moving through the station?

I told you I told you I told you I was one of those.

        -- Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan"

Fortune Cookie

    THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13: SLOBOL

SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler.

Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they

compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the

coffee.  Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom</p>

sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to

compile.  Weary SLOBOL programmers often turn to a related (but

infinitely faster) language, COCAINE.

Fortune Cookie

    Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great

crystal river.  Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs

and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and

resisting the current what each had learned from birth.  But one creature

said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going.  I shall

let go, and let it take me where it will.  Clinging, I shall die of boredom."

    The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool!  Let go, and that current

you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will

die quicker than boredom!"

    But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at

once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.  Yet, in time,

as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the

bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.

    And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See

a miracle!  A creature like ourselves, yet he flies!  See the Messiah, come

to save us all!"  And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more

Messiah than you.  The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go.

Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.

    But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the

rocks, making legends of a Saviour.

        -- Richard Bach

Fortune Cookie

Immortality consists largely of boredom.

        -- Zefrem Cochrane, "Metamorphosis", stardate 3219.8

Fortune Cookie

I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamt that I was reading on,

so I woke up from sheer boredom.

Fortune Cookie

God created woman.  And boredom did indeed cease from that moment --

but many other things ceased as well.  Woman was God's second mistake.

        -- Nietzsche

Fortune Cookie

"What you say is quite true," observed General Epanchin; then, clasping his hands behind his back, he returned to his place on the terrace steps, where he yawned with an air of boredom.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Idiot

It was at this time that the meeting, or, rather gathering of the members of this inharmonious family took place in the cell of the elder who had such an extraordinary influence on Alyosha. The pretext for this gathering was a false one. It was at this time that the discord between Dmitri and his father seemed at its acutest stage and their relations had become insufferably strained. Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to have been the first to suggest, apparently in joke, that they should all meet in Father Zossima's cell, and that, without appealing to his direct intervention, they might more decently come to an understanding under the conciliating influence of the elder's presence. Dmitri, who had never seen the elder, naturally supposed that his father was trying to intimidate him, but, as he secretly blamed himself for his outbursts of temper with his father on several recent occasions, he accepted the challenge. It must be noted that he was not, like Ivan, staying with his father, but living apart at the other end of the town. It happened that Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, who was staying in the district at the time, caught eagerly at the idea. A Liberal of the forties and fifties, a freethinker and atheist, he may have been led on by boredom or the hope of frivolous diversion. He was suddenly seized with the desire to see the monastery and the holy man. As his lawsuit with the monastery still dragged on, he made it the pretext for seeing the Superior, in order to attempt to settle it amicably. A visitor coming with such laudable intentions might be received with more attention and consideration than if he came from simple curiosity. Influences from within the monastery were brought to bear on the elder, who of late had scarcely left his cell, and had been forced by illness to deny even his ordinary visitors. In the end he consented to see them, and the day was fixed.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Brothers Karamazov

Louis XV. was at last to become his own prime minister and to reign alone; but in reality he was more embarrassed than pleased by the responsibility incumbent upon him. He therefore retained the persons who had composed Fleury's staff; though instead of being led by a single one of them, he fell into the hands of several, who disputed among themselves for the ascendancy: Maurepas, incomparable in little things, but neglectful of political affairs; D'Argenson, bold, and strongly attached to his work as minister of war; and the cardinal de Tencin, a frivolous and worldly priest. Old Marshal de Noailles tried to incite Louis XV. to take his kingship in earnest, thinking to cure him by war of his effeminate passions; and, in the spring of 1744, the king's grave illness at Metz gave a momentary hope of reconciliation between him and the deserted queen. But the duc de Richelieu, a roué who had joined hands with the sisters of the house of Nesle and was jealous of Marshal de Noailles, soon regained his lost ground; and, under the influence of this panderer to his pleasures, Louis XV. settled down into a life of vice. Holding aloof from active affairs, he tried to relieve the incurable boredom of satiety in the violent exercise of hunting, in supper-parties with his intimates, and in spicy indiscretions. Brought up religiously and to shun the society of women, his first experiences in adultery had been made with many scruples and intermittently. Little by little, however, jealous of power, yet incapable of exercising it to any purpose, he sank into a sensuality which became utterly shameless under the influence of his chief mistress the duchesse de Châteauroux. Entry: A

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 7 "Fox, George" to "France"     1910-1911

Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions like Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican in their sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them away from the capital, which, despite Milton's dream in _Areopagitica_ of its humming and surging energies, had ceased to be, what it now again became, the natural haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and court served to rally them. Charles II. relished _Hudibras_, used and pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard them with appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies, and held his own in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own tragedies and criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular argumentation and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the master-influence in prose. It produced a subtle but fundamental change in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer to living speech, it became more civil and natural and persuasive, and this not least in the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom, which seemed as unknown in the earlier part of the century as it is to the modern German, became strongly developed, and prose was much improved by the fear of provoking it. In all these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was created. Entry: IV

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 9, Slice 6 "English Language" to "Epsom Salts"     1910-1911

Index: