Top 100 Quotes About Ennui
#2. You do not wish to earn your living, to have a task, to fulfil a duty! It bores you to be like other men? Well! You will be different. Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find ennui his torment. You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a slave.
Victor Hugo
#3. In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.
Rebecca Solnit
#4. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna
#5. It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.
William Hazlitt
#8. I am paddling laps in a demitasse of home-brewed ennui
Michael Perry
#10. Weltanschaung as Ennui [10w]
When world-view turns to world-weariness,
we see staleness in everything.
Beryl Dov
#11. Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.
Gautama Buddha
#12. Music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui.
Thomas Jefferson
#14. What's your usual gig?"
"Physical fitness coach. I find it rather humdrum. Your assignment will be a welcome break in the quotidian ennui.
Julian May
#15. I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence.
Tahereh Mafi
#16. 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
#18. The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.
Blaise Pascal
#19. Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey
#20. Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.
Victor Hugo
#21. Oh, believe me, that when three great passions, such as sorrow, love, and gratitude fill the heart, ennui can find no place." "You
Alexandre Dumas
#22. The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
Oscar Wilde
#23. Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.
M.F.K. Fisher
#24. The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.
Alex Pareene
#25. If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself.
Max Stirner
#26. And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Terence McKenna
#27. All my struggles, my triumphs, my losses, were being eclipsed by what was being revealed now. Had ever ennui and despair been banished by such revelations, such precious gifts of truth?
Anne Rice
#28. If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
Henry David Thoreau
#29. A bouquet yellow like remorse
Hurts my view
The cage
The wheel
The vile ennui of all mankind
And no one no one to break my chains!
("Outcries")
Helene Baronne D'Oettingen
#30. Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui.
James K.A. Smith
#31. The girl arrived; I thought her handsome; and as I doubted not that you would be mortified by my absence, I did most sincerely hope that she would be able to dissipate something of your ennui: for it is the fidelity of the heart alone that I value.
Antoine Francois Prevost D'Exiles
#32. Ennui is the desire of activity without the fit means of gratifying the desire.
George Bancroft
#35. failed to yield to hooded figures, resulting in mandatory citywide ennui for hours.
Joseph Fink
#36. 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
#37. Adrenalin dispels boredom. Run, you sufferers from ennui! Run for your lives!
Mason Cooley
#38. On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#39. Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Emil Cioran
#40. Ennui is the disease of hearts without feeling, and of minds without resources.
Madame Roland
#41. I had neglected to provide myself with books, and as we crept along at the dull rate of four miles per hour, I soon felt the foul fiend Ennui coming upon me
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#42. Love is an emotion too often threatened by ennui to attain to the grand passion for which I have long since ceased to hope.
Tatamkhulu Afrika
#43. Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#44. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
David Foster Wallace
#45. Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.
Thomas Jefferson
#46. Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like "What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything?" Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.
Philip Yancey
#48. 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
#49. If you want to live in 'white world,' if you want to experience the stultifying boredom and penetrating ennui that homogeneity can bring, you can go to Canada any day of the year. It's an entire country named Doug.
Greg Proops
#50. Him yelling, Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.
Anonymous
#51. Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
Agnes Repplier
#52. 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.
Gustave Flaubert
#53. After work, she wandered around the center of Baltimore, aimlessly, interested in nothing. Was this what the novelists meant by ennui?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#54. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.
Henry David Thoreau
#55. As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds.
Charles Caleb Colton
#56. Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#57. Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).
James K.A. Smith
#58. Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.
Luke Rhinehart
#59. Ennui and lethargy are waging a war inside me.
Aaron Allston
#60. You wouldn't think you could get bored falling to your death ... But when it's a really, really long drop, there's a definite risk on ennui.
Tom Holt
#61. Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty.
Maria Edgeworth
#62. 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
#63. The xcursion helped dislodge your ... sense of ennui?
David Mitchell
#64. We are amused through the intellect, but it is the heart that saves us from ennui.
Sophie Swetchine
#65. Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.
Bertrand Russell
#66. Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
Emil Cioran
#68. i am awake only in what i love & desire to the point of terror -- everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain ...
Hakim Bey
#69. Thus people
so it seems to me
Become good friends from sheer ennui.
Alexander Pushkin
#70. 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
#71. Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.
Henry Miller
#72. Her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#73. I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.
Gregory Maguire
#74. It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
Helen Keller
#76. ennui - that dreaded mire of the human emotions.
Amor Towles
#77. His exhaled smoke was the exact colour of ennui.
Daniel Kraus
#78. The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui.
Helen Westley
#79. 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
#80. Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Emile M. Cioran
#81. Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for everyone. It keeps us from ennui and mischief, is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion.
Louisa May Alcott
#84. When the "deity" of the other is deflated, either because it is exhausted or because one becomes accustomed to living with a "god" or a "goddess," there is a terrific sense of ennui and boredom.
Fulton J. Sheen
#85. 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
#86. There is no sense of weariness like that which closes in a day of eager and unintermittent pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten, but "the core sticks in the throat." Expectation has then given way to ennui, appetite to satiety.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#87. There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.
D.H. Lawrence
#88. How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.
Edward Thomas
#89. I came running down the stairs that morning, like it was Christmas. My parents were already up. In my family, presents never waited; they were there upon waking. Our family has a problem with what they called delayed gratification. We want what we want when we want it, and we always want it now.
Neal Shusterman
#90. Some people just live out their whole lives with some sort of ache in their heart they never resolve.
Eda J. Vor
#91. I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.
Oscar Wilde
#92. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
#94. There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.
Robert Musil
#95. With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#96. The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
Haruki Murakami
#97. There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple
#98. I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn't actually care for.
Tama Janowitz
#99. I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.
Edward Gorey
#100. HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)
Terry Pratchett
