Top 100 Quotes About Dullness
#1. He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.
Samuel Foote
#2. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
Christian Wiman
#3. Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.
George Eliot
#4. May felt exhilarated around Bryant. He had always imagined that somewhere out there, away from suburban dullness, ardent young people were allowed to give freer rein to their thoughts. He felt as though he had arrived at a place he had always wanted to be.
Christopher Fowler
#5. Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
Oscar Wilde
#6. I've never known a Philadelphian who wasn't a downright 'character'; possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat.
Anita Loos
#7. I wondered if what one normally calls "normal" was itself a sort of dullness, a deadening of sense and spirit, if not, indeed, a very closure of their doors. For myself, now, liberated, released, emergent from the dark night and abyss, there was an intoxication of light and love and health.
Oliver Sacks
#8. A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. 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
#11. The only thing about 3-D is the dullness of the image.
Peter Jackson
#13. Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse).
Mike Curran
#14. There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay ... the essay must be pure
pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
Virginia Woolf
#15. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...
Elif Shafak
#16. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George Orwell
#17. He is not only dull in himself, but the cause of dullness in others.
Samuel Foote
#18. No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
Harold Rosenberg
#19. There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
Henry David Thoreau
#21. Character is a lack of doubt, character is stubbornly persevering in an intention no matter how senseless it is, character is a lack of imagination, character is inborn dullness, character is the misfortune of humanity.
Tadeusz Konwicki
#22. Society ... is tolerant of crimes, and long suffering with dullness, but it shows no mercy to those who are different from other people.
Geraldine Jewsbury
#23. The psychic plane is clouded over by emotions and thoughts and the general dullness and malaise that develops in our contemporary world through the social conditioning that most individuals experience in the modern era.
Frederick Lenz
#24. Wine, like the rising sun, possession gains,
And drives the mist of dullness from the brains,
The gloomy vapor from the spirit flies,
And views of gaiety and gladness rise.
George Crabbe
#26. You cannot sell a man who isn't listening; word of mouth is the best medium of all; and dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.
William Bernbach
#27. What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.
Charles Lamb
#28. In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No, the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.
D.H. Lawrence
#29. Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.
Kathy Acker
#30. I envy Pete Sampras's dullness. I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration.
Andre Agassi
#31. The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
Leo Tolstoy
#32. There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.
Frank Capra
#33. He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.
Gustave Flaubert
#34. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.
Henry A. Wallace
#35. I need to somehow peel away the dullness and heighten my sensitivity and alertness. I need to start sucking the juice out of every single moment of the most precious gift ever to be had, "my life!"
Bryan Kest
#36. Under the vague dullness of the gray hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object and finds it in the privation of an untried good.
George Eliot
#38. When the boy asked him if this knowledge were a special knowledge only to the blind the blind man said that it was not. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had no time to sharpen them.
Cormac McCarthy
#39. I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.
there's nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us
Charles Bukowski
#40. When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
John O'Donohue
#42. How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.
Graham Greene
#44. I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
George Eliot
#45. If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
Edith Sitwell
#46. (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.
Wyndham Lewis
#47. We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
William Hazlitt
#48. Let my lips avoid vain repetition as I lift my voice in praise, O Lord. Distract me from my distractions, awaken me from the dullness of mind, and transform habit and routine into vibrant times of worship.
Jack W. Hayford
#49. Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
George Santayana
#50. It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
Joseph Conrad
#52. I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. - Carol Kennicott
Sinclair Lewis
#53. To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought - become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.
John Gardner
#54. Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.
Samuel Beckett
#55. The past, rich with it's pains and joys, shuffles before me, relieving the weary dullness of endless days. I rejoice; I agonize.
Rukhsana Ahmad
#57. Who is that is dreaming all of this? Ecstasy, pure ecstasy, joy beyond understanding, bliss beyond the dry dullness of the mind's philosophical ranging, light beyond any light in this world - The substance and the essence of all existence is this light, the transcendental light.
Frederick Lenz
#58. Our wickedness shall not overpower the unspeakable goodness and mercy of God; our dullness shall not overpower God's wisdom, nor our infirmity God's omnipotence.
John Of Kronstadt
#59. I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be - nothing.
Sinclair Lewis
#60. The hindrances to being psychic are a general dullness that develops from living in the material world, and being a material girl.
Frederick Lenz
#61. The commonplace needs no defence,Dullness is in the critic's eyes,Without a licence life evolvesFrom some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms,Behind these hedges trimly shorn,As in a stable once, so hereIt may be born, it may be born.
William Plomer
#62. Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.
Charles Caleb Colton
#63. Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Edith Sitwell
#64. Maybe the greatest gift marriage gives us is the chance to fantasize, to imagine that there's more to life than there actually is, and it accomplishes this by assuming responsibility for all the misery and dullness that we would otherwise equate with life itself.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#65. Perhaps we become accustomed to our grief and, as it becomes increasingly familiar, increasingly part of the emotional landscape, it becomes a dullness. But there is no closure, no forgetting. One mourns those one has loved who have died until one joins them. It happens soon enough.
David Rieff
#66. Dullness it is that perverts and corrups the spirit but it is always possible to look past the dullness, and see the bright, shining heart of things
Jude Morgan
#67. Still, as much as I had experienced, there was more waiting to be found. I had started out with a feeling of burning dullness and desperation. Now I was filled with a thrill and expectation of new discovery.
Peter Jenkins
#68. Mystery is the wine of this universe. It makes us dizzy and makes us feel happy! Man needs enigma so that he can get rid of the dullness of the reality!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#69. Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.
Dorothy Parker
#71. You can, I think, have a quiet and steady protagonist and not run the risk of terminal dullness as long as exciting things happen to them and around them, and crime is the ideal genre for making this come about.
Liz Williams
#72. I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
Richard Powers
#73. Love from novels isn't true love: it ends where it should begin. True love, deep love, grows up with time, throughout days of dullness and days of storms. It leaves in one's heart a rainbow of tenderness and forgiveness which illuminates forever the beloved one.
Gabrielle Dubois
#74. Put a very clever man next to a genius, his brightness will immediately turn to dullness!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#75. Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small.
Franz Grillparzer
#77. Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.
Josephus Daniels
#78. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them. Y
Cormac McCarthy
#79. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?
William Makepeace Thackeray
#80. Dullness. Only humans could have invented it. What imaginations they had.
Terry Pratchett
#81. It is only in times of great and grievous dullness that the believer regards prayer as a duty, and not as a privilege.
Adolph Saphir
#82. Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God's name did they want of me?
Daniel Keyes
#83. For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.
Tennessee Williams
#84. In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
George Eliot
#85. Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing ...
Ellen Glasgow
#86. In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
William Butler Yeats
#87. But a certain dullness of mind seems an almost necessary qualification, if not for every public man, at least for every one seriously engaged in making money.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#88. Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.
Walter Bagehot
#90. I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good. Dissatisfaction
George Eliot
#91. Most ardent reformers are accompanied by but equal portion of dullness . John Quincy Adams
Paul C. Nagel
#92. The calm man is not the man who is dull. You must not mistake Sattva for dullness or laziness. The calm man is the one who has control over the mind waves. Activity is the manifestation of inferior strength, calmness, of the superior.
Swami Vivekananda
#93. If to raise malicious smiles at the infirmities or misfortunes of those who have never injured us be the province of wit or humour, Heaven grant me a double portion of dullness.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#94. We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
Freya Stark
#96. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness
much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.
E. M. Forster
#97. Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.
David Foster Wallace
#98. The book designer strives for perfection; yet every perfect thing lives somewhere in the neighborhood of dullness and is frequently mistaken for it by the insensitive.
Jan Tschichold
#99. We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.
Hildegard Of Bingen
#100. With color, for the price of a pot of paint, people can express their own style and individuality. But, as with style, a gift for color has to be developed by experiment. If you don't dare, you are doomed to dullness.
Shirley Conran
