Quotes About Acedia

No, the contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one's living; it is man's happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God—which is to say love. Love that certainly brings a particular freshness and readiness to work along with it, but that no one with the least experience could conceivably confuse with the tense activity of the fanatical "worker".

Our modern Empire of Desire manufactures endless appetite while simultaneously denying that anything is objectively good, beautiful, or desirable. The result is not great yearning or passion, but acedia or sloth, a pervasive 'noonday demon.

In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia , a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.

Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life--or love. How to love?

The sin of acedia is cutting ourselves off from the rest of the universe, cutting ourselves off from... really, the music of the universe... We cut ourselves off from that and we ourselves are listless and without music.

El genio tenía sus desventajas: la melancolía, el spleen, la saudade, la acedia, la búskomorság que solía azotarla después de la euforia

In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called "acedia": a "weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection" that took "possession" of unhappy souls and left them lazy, sluggish, restless, and solitary. Later, acedia became widely translated as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, and blended with melancholy in the popular mind. Both required, at the very least, confession and penitence.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

Psychologically, accidia manifests as a loss of interiority, a refusal to see, and a resistance to change. The combination of loss of interiority and the resigned and abnegated character that goes along with it, results in a syndrome of a good-hearted, comfortable "earthiness" that may be exaggerated to the point of literalness and narrowness.

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It's the sin of my middle age, too.

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.