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cea4249
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HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)
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humor
cynism
ennui
boredom
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Terry Pratchett |
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55a3893
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I'm bored' is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you've seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you're alive is amazing, so you don't get to say 'I'm bored.
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bored
reprimand
inspirational
boredom
advice
young
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Louis C.K. |
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e2729c1
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The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
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death
life
inspirational
boredom
misery
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Michel Houellebecq |
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671f660
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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called , or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament--the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana--is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.
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reading
writing
christianity
inspiration
religion
ancient-greeks
cana
entheos
judaea
marriage-at-cana
mullahs
omar-khayyam
symposia
iran
hellenism
passover
passover-seder
oxford
new-testament
boredom
brotherhood
plato
miracles
atheism
food
wine
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Christopher Hitchens |
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e167c6b
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Boredom can be a lethal thing on a small island.
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funny
inspirational
boredom
crazy
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Christopher Moore |
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625ef98
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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fulfillment
boredom
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Saul Bellow |
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5cef7f8
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Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliche (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliche upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.
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irony
history
humour
politics
1968
1970s
1980s
1988
allegiance
arrest
bad-crowds
charter-77
gorbachev
kafka
nelson-mandela
vaclav-havel
zdenek-mlynar
prague
moscow
czechoslovakia
arguments
exile
commitment
bureaucracy
boredom
clichés
generosity
dissent
totalitarianism
detention
mediocrity
charm
russia
communism
loyalty
police
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6053c1f
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She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
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marriage
boredom
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Gustave Flaubert |
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4b414cf
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The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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suicide
solitude
loneliness
satisfaction
depression
cyberworld
endlessness
facebook-addiction
filler
first-world-problems
virtual
solitary
stimulation
distractions
dissatisfaction
facebook-quotes
david-foster-wallace
jonathan-franzen
boredom
facebook
cyber
emptiness
problems
robinson-crusoe
empty
void
lonely
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3add49c
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My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
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sleep
cure-for-boredom
boredom
restlessness
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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0f75173
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Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.
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bond
boredom
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Ian Fleming |
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f7924e8
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Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.
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boredom
hell
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Victor Hugo |
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643a9a8
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He thought of hanging himself, to pass the time.
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suicide
godot
samuel-beckett
ennui
hanging
boredom
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Johnny Rich |
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6a68dd2
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Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.
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boredom
internet-addiction
distraction
pornography
internet
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Alain de Botton |
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78c012e
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From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.
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ennui
boredom
urbanism
england
london
urban-life
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Beryl Markham |
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b76759c
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"Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:"Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound...Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly."
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travel
boredom
mountains
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Jon Krakauer |
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8a1dd62
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Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.
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truth
boredom
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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8719c4d
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But it was not just his kisses that she missed. There was something else about the man that exhilarated her, something that appealed to a kindred spirit in her. Mr. Seyton was a man with a goal in life, and he was willing to work toward that goal even at the expense of his own safety. There was a spirit of adventure in him. Kate found herself envying him greatly. If only there could be more adventure in her life! She would burst soon at the boredom of her present existence.
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boredom
daring-masquerade
kindred-spirits
made-for-each-other
regency-romance
mary-balogh
soul-mates
romance-novel
historical-romance
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Mary Balogh |