“I try to enthuse my patients with the glory of the world, with indifferent success, I must admit. It is almost as if they wanted the world to be boring, to justify their own lack of interest in it. To be bored and disabused is taken by many people nowadays as a sign of spiritual election or superiority, as if the world does not quite come up to their exacting standards.”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27, 2003
“The function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Defence of China Shepherdesses” in The Defendant quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (11/12/2021)
“If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.”
Alan Watts quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go
“Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Introductory Remarks” in Heretics quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #5 (March-April 2014)
“All this shows how much luck there is in human affairs, and how little we should worry about anything except doing our best.”
Winston Churchill The Hinge of Fate [with respect to Parliament not turning on him in the dark period]
“Boredom can literally kill you, according to an excellent new little book on the subject, published this week… Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom... was inspired to write the book by a friend who killed himself out of boredom, and Mr. Svendsen shows how boredom, or the escape from boredom, is a much greater incitement to action than is excitement. People get drunk out of boredom; people give up reading newspaper articles such as this one out of boredom; people contract unwise sexual encounters out of boredom. But the dreadful thing is that even sex ends up boring, according to Mr. Svendsen. There is, in fact, a psychological term for it, he says: taedium sexualitatis.... Humans seem to be unfairly picked out for boredom, as we are for drunkenness and suicide, lemmings notwithstanding. Animals, medical studies apparently show, can be understimulated, but not bored. And, even worse, modern humans seem to be particularly prey … The word ‘boring’ in the dreary sense, as opposed to the drilling water pipes sense was used for the first time in England only in the 1760s. That’s not to say that people weren’t bored before 1760, just that there was a European explosion of boredom at about that time. The Germans invented their word for boredom, Langeweile, at the same time. And it was only with late-18th-century Romanticism that the demand got going for life to be interesting. The obsession has boomed ever since. Nowadays, it is hard to think of a time when one is not subject to at least one of the four types … Mr. Svendsen comes up with: boredom of situation, such as being trapped on a train without a book; boredom of satiety, when you have too much of a good thing; existential boredom, where you’ve just had enough of the world; and creative boredom, when you’re forced to come up with something new such as, say, an interesting item in a newspaper article.”
An author whose name I did not record in the Ottawa Citizen March 12, 2005
“If anyone who wanders all day arrives toward evening, it is enough.”
Petrarch, quoted by Schopenhauer, according to a writer whose name I did not record in The New Republic March 4, 1991
“The moral will as our human center! How disappointing a message this must sound to our modern ears! How odd and simpleminded… above all, how tame a cause this is to argue, how prosaic and stodgy, how positively hackneyed and old-hat! Ours is an age of sensational discoveries…”
William Barrett The Illusion of Technique