Quotes About Ennui

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.

I also knew Grenville was a man easily bored.

But after a while, the whole thing just wasn't interesting to him anymore, and he ran out of things to keep himself numb.

Society frowns upon candidness, except in privacy; good sense knows that it can always be abused; and the Child fears it because of the unmasking which it involves. Hence in order to get away from the ennui of pastimes without exposing themselves to the dangers of intimacy, most people compromise for games when they are available, and these fill the major part of the more interesting hours of social intercourse. That is the social significance of games.

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

but the air's flat and stale and the people half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that.

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.

I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

Besides, life had become confoundedly dull of late. The Season had lost its charms after so many years of sameness.

I may not be old but I'm too old to have this much nothing

Boredom is a bit of a bore, to say the least.

Next to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in our lives.

The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrationa bipeds who hurt only themselves.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.

My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.

Se conocían demasiado para gozar de aquellos embelesos de la pasión que centuplican su gozo. Ella estaba tan hastiada de él como él cansado de ella. Emma volvía a encontrar en el adulterio todas las soserías del matrimonio

All that has to do with life is repugnant to me; everything that draws me to it horrifies me. I should like never to have been born, or to die. I have within me, deep within me, a distaste which keeps me from enjoying anything and which fills my soul to the point of suffocating it. It reappears in relation to everything, like the bloated bodies of dogs which come back to the surface of the water despite the stones that have been tied to their necks to drown them.

Sometimes they opened a book and closed it again; what was the point? On other days they had the idea of tidying up the garden, but after a quarter of an hour they felt tired; or of looking at their farm, but they came back sick at heart; or doing household jobs, but Germaine cried out in protest; they gave up.