Tedious Quotes - Page 11

• Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

  Arthur Helps

  Time, Play, Long

  Sir Arthur Helps (1852). “Companions of My Solitude”, p.239

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• Film work can be tedious and sort of all over the place, especially when you have a family and you're going off and doing things somewhere else.

  Zachary Knighton

  Somewhere Else, Film

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• It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.

  Rudy Rucker

  Watches, Half, Hours

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• Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

  Peter Shaffer

  Race, Librarian

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• In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages, long ago betid

  William Shakespeare

  Winter, Night, Fire

  'Richard II' (1595) act 5, sc. 1, l. 40

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• One woman reads another's character Without the tedious trouble of deciphering

  Ben Jonson

  Women, Character, Trouble

  Ben Jonson, Margaret Jane Kidnie (2000). “Poetaster, Or, The Arraignment: Sejanus His Fall ; The Devil is an Ass ; The New Inn, Or, The Light Heart”, p.409, Oxford : Oxford University Press

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• That which is repeated too often becomes insipid and tedious.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Boredom, Speech, Insipid

  "The Art of Poetry (Canto I)". Book by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, 1674.

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• Life is short and tedious, and is wholly spent in wishing; we trust to find rest and enjoyment at some future time, often at an age when our best blessings, youth and health, have already left us. When at last I that time has arrived, it surprises us in the midst of fresh desires; we have got no farther when we are attacked by a fever which kills us; if we had been cured, it would only have been to give us more time for other desires.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Life, Blessing, Giving

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• Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.

  Bill Vaughan

  Patience, Men, Details

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• A man who keeps a diary pays, Due toll to many tedious days; But life becomes eventful—then, His busy hand forgets the pen. Most books, indeed, are records less Of fulness than of emptiness.

  William Allingham

  Book, Men, Hands

  William Allingham, Helen Paterson Allingham (1912). “Poems”

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• The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.

  Edward Hoagland

  Life, Disappointment, Loss

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• I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation - to serve in parliaments, - and ( because I would not be over tedious ) I did endeavour to discharge the duty of an honest man in those services, to God, and his people's interest, and of the commonwealth; having, when time was, a competent acceptation in the hearts of men, and some evidence thereof.

  Oliver Cromwell

  Heart, Men, People

  Oliver Cromwell (1901). “Speeches, 1644-1658”

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• A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.

  Marcel Proust

  Eye, Men, Earth

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.346, Modern Library

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• You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.

  Peter Greenaway

  Mistake, Mean, Black

  Peter Greenaway, Sei Shōnagon (1996). “The pillow book”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• The Shah regarded politics as the province of demagoguery, an art in which only charlatans could excel. He had no time for what he saw as the tedious process of achieving consensus through debate and discussion and tried to justify his solitary exercise of power by insisting it was what Iran needed to catch up with lost time. He believed he was more patriotic than anyone else and needed no advice on how best to promote and protect the highest interests of the nation.

  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

  Art, Patriotic, Exercise

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• What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.617, Vintage

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• Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears; the effect of precepts is therefore slow and tedious, whilst that of examples is summary and effectual.

  Seneca the Younger

  Eye, Men, Example

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• How many brave Men, courageous Women, and innocent Children did I see butcher'd, to do God good Service?. .. I went to the Irish Rebellion, where I saw more than three hundred thousand Souls murder'd in cold Blood.crying, Nits will become Lice, destroy Root and Branch: with a thousand other Barbarities, too tedious as well as too dreadful to repeat, beside what has been transacted abroad.

  Mary Davys

  Children, Women, Blood

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• Friendship's said to be a plant of tedious growth, its root composed of tender fibers, nice in their taste, cautious in spreading.

  John Vanbrugh

  Friendship, Nice, Roots

  Sir John Vanbrugh (1970). “The relapse”

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• It is one of the vexatious mortifications of a studious man to have his thoughts disordered by a tedious visit.

  Roger L'Estrange

  Men, Mortification, Bores

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• Truth will never be tedious unto him that travelleth in the secrets of nature; there is nothing but falsehood that glutteth us.

  Seneca the Younger

  Truth, Secret, Falsehood

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• The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.

  William James

  Teacher, Philosophy, Educational

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• Autumn truly is what summer pretends to be: the best of all seasons. It is as glorious as summer is tedious; as subtle as summer is obvious; as refreshing as summer is wearying. Autumn seems like paradise.

  Gregg Easterbrook

  Summer, Autumn, Paradise

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• Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks... Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.

  Silvanus P. Thompson

  Education, Stupid, Math

  Silvanus P. Thompson (1914). “Calculus Made Easy: Differential Calculus and the Integral Calculus”

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• You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is.

  Jean-Pierre de Caussade

  Children, Would Be, Upheaval

  Jean-Pierre De Caussade (2012). “Abandonment to Divine Providence”, p.47, Image

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