Ennui Quotes - Page 3

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

  Ingmar Bergman

  Over You, Feelings, Trying

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• Adrenalin dispels boredom. Run, you sufferers from ennui! Run for your lives!

  Mason Cooley

  Running, Boredom, Sufferers

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• 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.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Work, Profound, Doubt

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• ... 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.

  Margaret Halsey

  Proof, Produce, Deals

  Margaret Halsey (1938). “With Malice Toward Some”

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Exhausted, Knows

  Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Wit (1946)

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• A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes-not elsewhere-I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world.

  T.C. Boyle

  Believe, Home, Simple

  T. C. Boyle (2012). “San Miguel”, p.130, A&C Black

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• In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui [boredom] is, or if we are ever driven to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Gambling, Boredom, Employment

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

  Agnes Repplier

  Guests, Leisure, Delight

  Agnes Repplier (1894). “In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers”

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• Now is the autumn of our ennui.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Autumn

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters”, p.76, Random House

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• The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

  Blaise Pascal

  Life, Men, Anxiety

  "Pensées" (1669), Article VI. 46 in "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, (pp. 440-455), 1922.

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• Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Spiritual, Sadness, Sick

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• Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and enlivening expectations, which form the better part of life.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Blessing, Expectations, Boredom

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1835). “Lodore”, p.8

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• Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines.

  Russell Kirk

  Men, Class, Church

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.488, Regnery Publishing

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

  Gregory Maguire

  Mean, Blood, Evil

  Gregory Maguire (2013). “The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz”, p.82, Harper Collins

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

  Madame Roland

  Heart, Boredom, Feelings

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• 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.

  Nalini Singh

  Angel, Kissing, Air

  Nalini Singh (2013). “Archangel's Legion”, p.46, Penguin

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

  Thomas Jefferson

  Body, Hysterical, Labor

  Letter to Martha Jefferson, 28 March (1787)

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• 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.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Gambling, May, Succeed

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.147

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• 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.

  Edmund Clarence Stedman

  Mother, Art, War

  Edmund Clarence Stedman (1885). “Poets of America”

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• I wouldn't wish my consort to suffer ennui.

  Nalini Singh

  Suffering, Wish

  Nalini Singh (2013). “Archangel's Legion”, p.46, Penguin

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• In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.

  Roger Ebert

  Kids, Games, Track

  Roger Ebert (2006). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007”, p.801, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• (Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  Yellow, Sick, House

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• Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom

  Charles Baudelaire

  Fate, Winter, Bored

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• Her beauty satisfied [his] artistic eye, her peculiarities piqued his curiosity, her vivacity lightened his ennui, and her character interested him by the unconscious hints it gave of power, pride and passion. So entirely natural and unconventional was she that he soon found himself on a familiar footing, asking all manner of unusual questions, and receiving rather piquant replies.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Character, Eye, Passion

  Louisa May Alcott (1997). “A Long Fatal Love Chase”, Thorndike Pr

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• Ennui and lethargy are waging a war inside me.

  Aaron Allston

  War, Lethargy

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