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Tedium Quotes

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Tedium Quotes

“It’s hard to safeguard a genuine life course, when love tips over from endearing care into tedium, through laziness of imagination or loss of interest, and the storyline becomes barren and desolate, insipidly dull, turning into a threadbare act with the same trite modus operandi. “The same procedure as every year, James!” ("Things needing to be changed")”

“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 !”

“The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in “The Book of Disquiet” of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. “I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real – only then do I find myself comforted.”

“Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.”

“I was only ever truly loved once. Everyone has always treated me kindly. Even the most casual acquaintance has found it difficult to be rude or brusque or even cool to me. Sometimes with a little help from me, that kindness could - or at least might - have developed into love or affection. I've had neither the patience nor the concentration of mind to want to make the effort. When I first noticed this in myself - so little do we know ourselves - I attributed it to some shyness of the soul. But then I realised that this wasn't the case, it was an emotional tedium, different from the tedium of life; an impatience with the idea of associating myself with one continuous feeling, especially if that meant steeling myself to make some sustained effort. Why bother thought the unthinking part of me. I have enough subtlety, enough psychological sensitivity to know how, but the why has always escaped me. My weakness of will always began by being a weakness of the will even to have a will. The same happened with my emotions, my intelligence, my will itself, with everything in my life. But on the one occasion that malicious fate caused me to believe I loved someone and to recognise that I really was loved in return , it left me at first stunned and confused as if my number had come up on the lottery and I had won a huge amount of money in some inconvertible currency. Then, because I'm only human, I felt rather flattered. However, that most natural of emotions soon passed, to be overtaken by a feeling difficult to define but one in which tedium, humiliation and weariness predominated. A feeling of tedium as if fate had imposed on me a task to be carried out during some unfamiliar evening shift. As if a new duty - that of an awful reciprocity - were given to me, ironically, as a privilege over which I would have to toil, all the time thanking fate for it. As if the flaccid monotony of life were not enough to bear without superimposing on it the obligatory monotony of a definite feeling.”

“2. The banality of time torments us, the tedium of existence mocks us, and many minor incidences irritate human beings. While we seek to inscribe a personal place in a finite realm, we live in a world without any actual boarders known as the universe. Human wastefulness, suffering, and cruelty know no bounds. Irrespective of all the unfortunate occasions in life that prove painful, stressful, sorrowful, or dreary, all misfortunate setbacks along with the shattering monotony of human existence are part of the vicissitudes of living a sentient life. If a person can view the enigmas of life from a detached perspective that respects life without worrying about the ultimate tragedy of all existence, when we return to the void from which we came, life will appear as a dream, a phantasm.”

“But it seems to Samuel that all the school is preparing them for is to sit quietly and fake that they're working. To feign the appearance of concentration when in fact they're checking sports scores or e-mail or watching videos or spacing out. And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly a your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.”

“TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source --the first words of the ancient Latin hymn _Te Deum Laudamus_. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.”

“I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.”

“Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.”

“Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was reminded of it during some of the long, drawn-out portions of JFK. However, nothing that Stone has directed or misdirected prepared me for the grotesque mess that is Natural Born Killers.”

“It should be the privilege of every worker to take advantage of all the improved methods of working that relieve him from the tedium and fatigue of purely mechanical toil, for by this means he gains leisure for the thought necessary to working out his designs, and for the finer touches that the hand alone can give. So long as he remains master of his machinery it will serve him well, and his power of artistic expression will be freed rather than stifled by turning over to it work it is meant to do.”

“Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation!”

“The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.”