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Lethargy Quotes

Browse 76 quotes about Lethargy.

Lethargy Quotes

“The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul.”

SoulReasonDeathHellDamnationTrivialityLethargyFlippancy
Book:That Hideous Strength
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“Mais, j’aurai beau supplier, j’aurai beau me révolter, il n’y aura plus rien pour moi ; je ne serai, désormais, ni heureux, ni malheureux. Je ne peux pas ressusciter. Je vieillirai aussi tranquille que je le suis aujourd’hui dans cette chambre où tant d’êtres ont laissé leur trace, où aucun être n’a laissé la sienne. Cette chambre, on la retrouve à chaque pas. C’est la chambre de tout le monde. On croit qu’elle est fermée, non : elle est ouverte aux quatre vents de l’espace. Elle est perdue au milieu des chambres semblables, comme de la lumière dans le ciel, comme un jour dans les jours, comme moi partout. Moi, moi ! Je ne vois plus maintenant que la pâleur de ma figure, aux orbites profondes, enterrée dans le soir, et ma bouche pleine d’un silence qui doucement, mais sûrement, m’étouffe et m’anéantit. Je me soulève sur mon coude comme sur un moignon d’aile. Je voudrais qu’il m’arrivât quelque chose d’infini !”

DeathHopeHellDepressionIntrovertWearinessEnnuiTediumLethargyWeltschmerz
Book:Hell
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“Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.”

PsychologyInertiaLethargy
Book:Psychology: The Briefer Course
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“There is a useful sorrow, and a destructive sorrow. Sorrow is useful when we weep for our sins, and for our neighbour’s ignorance, and so that we may not relax our purpose to attain to true goodness, these are the real kinds of sorrow. Our enemy adds something to this. For he sends sorrow without reason, which is something called lethargy. We ought always to drive out a sadness like that with prayers and psalms.”

SorrowLethargyAcediaSyncletica
Book:The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection
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“She was now more than ever confronted with the outward cries of help that leaped at her like an overflowing bathtub where the water had grown cold and rancid. The catastrophe had caught up with her. It had always been there, a re-emerging siren in scarlet tones, a temptation of the abysmal artillery of the brain, a carousel waltzing with crazed horses, the heel-clicking and tap-dancing back chambers where arthropods lay on their carapaces.”

ViolenceMotherhoodMental IllnessAgonyHelplessnessLethargyWithin Paravent Walls
Book:Within Paravent Walls
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“Freneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It's the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis' - le Mazel released the word carelessly - 'it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide.”

DecadenceMorbidOpiumHempOpiatesLethargySyphilisDecadentDecadentsSomnolence
Book:Monsieur de Phocas
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“When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.”

HumorSchoolWorkInterestingEducationWeekHumourSevenEmploymentBoredBoredomEmployeeFrustrationSundaySatireJobWeekendApathyUnemploymentSaturdayJokeEmployedFridayEmployersUnemployedDissatisfactionRestlessnessWearinessMonotonyEmployeesDullnessEnnuiEmployerLethargyWeekdaysBoreFlatnessWeekendsWeeksEmployUnconcernWeekdayUninterestingDrearinessRepetitivenessLassitude TediumRestiveness
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.”

WayWritingHeartSoulNightPaperMy FriendsLogicFinalsArguingElectricLampsFrontiersAll NightCrushedCeilingsBrillianceMosquesBrassDomesUp All NightLethargyDelirious
Author:Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
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“a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.”

WantWritingMayBookStatesFeelingsFacesSpiritDesireImaginationBreakMonthsQuietIllusionDiscoveryMysteriousChiefsNovelistsUnconsciousShyPerpetualRegularityLethargyDartsSame Face
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“[The sea] is the healer and the reviver, it cleanses the cavities of self-disgust and melancholy, of sloth and negation with the salt solution of life. It cures the lethargies of flesh and spirit with the slap and shake of elemental force. It cradles and comforts. Give it trust and it holds you secure; fight it and it kills.”

GivingSelfSpiritFightingForceSeaComfortOceanSolutionsFleshCuresSecureShakesMelancholySaltDisgustingCradleSlapHealerSlothElementalsNegationLethargy
Author:Marya Mannes
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“[The sceptic] must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge any thing, that all human life must perish, were his principles to prevail.All discourse, all action would immediately cease, and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.”

IfsMenHumansEndsActionExistencePrinciplesCeaseMiserableHuman LifeAcknowledgeSkepticismDiscourseUnsatisfiedLethargySceptic
Book:An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion
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“I came to the resolve that the attempt was not only worth trying, but should be tried in the very near future if we wanted at all to keep our flag flying; for I was sure as of my own existence that if another decade was allowed to pass without an endeavour of some kind or another to shake off an unjust yoke, the Irish people would sink into lethargy from which it would be impossible for any patriot . . . to arouse them . . .”

PeopleIfsShouldTryingKindWould BeWantedMy OwnExistenceImpossibleRepublicanDecadesFlyingShakesResolveFlagsPatriotUnjustEndeavourYokeLethargy
Author:James Stephens
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“We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression, the infinite seas, the wild rocks, the melancholy language of the black trees in the snow, the wild strength of spring flowers and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer day when Pan, our old friend, sleeps and the ghosts of midday whisper. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form.”

MenWorldGivingHumansEnoughBodyHandsFacesFormLanguageGivenEnjoyBlackSleepForgetGriefTreeSeaRocksExpressionFlowerSummerSpringInfiniteHotHeavyGladGhostSnowBreastsMelancholyOld FriendsSorrowfulHuman FacesSummer DaysSpring FlowersLethargyHot Summer
Author:Max Beckmann
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“Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.”

MindKindForceEffortPeriodsConstantProductivityRelaxRelaxationFertileSapDullnessLethargyFarmland
Author:Seneca the Younger
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“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

PeopleSoulShowsOneselfStealingDullEmptinessFacultyNervesConformityIndifferentInwardConformDetachmentNumbnessCallousLethargy
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect---simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story.”

PeopleIfsWantStoriesMightPassionImaginationBoysEmotionalGoes OnPicksPropertyDearIntellectLoyaltyCustomsNot AfraidConfessionConsistencyShallowFaithfulnessFidelityEmotional LifeLethargy
Book:Picture of Dorian Gray
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“So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?”

ShouldWritingI CanIdeasDreamActionCertainForgetPossibilityI've LearnedSpiteNightmareShould IFilesComplacencyFilingLethargyForget Me
Book:Invisible Man
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“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”

IfsKnowsInspirationalTryingHardAsksUnderstandingSidesFriendshipSituationSupportAdviceLonelinessWise WordsPleaseDepressionEmpathyResponseWeatherComedianBest ThingsResolveSympathyHopelessnessStraightforwardBeing ThereBlacknessLoneliness And SolitudeLethargyBad SituationsOvercoming DepressionBeing DepressedPeople With DepressionHelp With Depression
Author:Stephen Fry
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“What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”

PeopleIfsCountryGovernmentSpiritPoliticsFreedomLibertyArmsGunConstitutionResistancePreservesPatriotismAmendmentsRulersFoundersPatriotGun ControlFoundingFreedom And LibertySecond AmendmentFreedom LibertyProperty RightsDeclaration Of IndependenceFirearmsRight To Bear ArmsMilitiaBearing ArmsIndividual LibertyGun RightsFederalistFree GovernmentPublic InterestRights And FreedomsPro GunFounding Fathers Gun2 AmendmentUs ConstitutionEternal VigilanceFounding Fathers Second AmendmentAmerican LibertyFramersLiberty And JusticeSocial RevolutionLethargyDisarmingPrice Of FreedomRevolution Founding FathersAmendment 1Government And SocietyStrong ArmsAmendment 19Amendment 4Amendment 13Voting Founding FathersDivided GovernmentLiberty Tree
Author:Thomas Jefferson
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“Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.”

MindSpiritualUsedBreakJudgingIntellectualAidsTyrannyMultitudesSuperiorityGreat MindsLethargyIntellectual Superiority
Book:Lectures on the elevation of the labouring portion of the community
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“Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren. Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives. We move in either frightened panic or deluded lethargy as we are, in turn, alarmed by specters and soothed by placebos. If there is no center, there is no circumference.”

IfsMovingTurnsOur LivesWorshipMercyMeetingsResponseFrightenedPanicSeductionJerkAdvertisementsDeludedSirensLethargyPlacebo
Author:Edmund Clowney
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