"Ennui" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Certainly my ennui was greatly relieved by the visits of Montresor, which grew very frequent, the lad appearing to have conceived a kindness for me; and during those three weeks our fellowship at nights over a bottle or two engendered ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... heard so much of the cannon-fever, that I wanted to know what kind of thing it was. ENNUI, and a spirit which every kind of danger excites to daring, nay even to rashness, induced me to ride up quite coolly to the outwork of La Lune. This was again occupied by our people; but it presented the wildest aspect. The roofs were shot to pieces; the corn-shocks scattered about, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... knowledge, letters, science, and morality; to wear a red coat and an epaulette; to be called captain; to figure at a ball; to lounge away time in country sports, at country quarters, was never, even in times of peace, creditable; but it is now absurd and base. Submitting to a certain portion of ennui and contempt, this mode of life for an officer was formerly practicable—but now cannot be submitted to without utter, irremediable disgrace. Officers are now, in general, men of education and information; want of knowledge, sense, manners, must consequently be immediately detected, ridiculed, and ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... act opens with a dance given in honour of Tatiana's birthday. Onegin feels bored and out of sheer ennui he begins to flirt with Olga. The thoughtless girl willingly yields to the young man's attentions and promises to dance the cotillion with him, in order to punish her lover for his jealousy.—This tactless behaviour enrages ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... at times she must be missed; and could not think, without pain, of Emma's losing a single pleasure, or suffering an hour's ennui, from the want of her companionableness: but dear Emma was of no feeble character; she was more equal to her situation than most girls would have been, and had sense, and energy, and spirits that might be hoped would bear her well and happily through its little difficulties and privations. And ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... guide-book)—one young man, "sobbing, buries his head in his hands, upsetting thereby a dish of fruit." As for Potiphar, it failed to stir the sombre depths of his abysmal boredom, but his wife, whose ennui had hitherto been of the most profound, began to sit up and take notice, and at the end of the dance she sent for Joseph and supplemented his rather exiguous costume with a gross necklace of jewels, letting her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... (fearing it was not in accord with the strictest propriety, especially after taking orders) until he came to California. Here he had found a life of such loneliness, that, as a refuge from almost unbearable ennui, he had gone back to his youthful feline love with more than youthful ardor. When he came to take charge of the Mission, San Buenaventura, three years before, he had brought with him, carefully watched over, four immense cats, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... King,—and have had boys examined and threatened with deportation to betray the secrets of my relations with the same person. In addition to this I might direct attention to those trifling exercises of the fancy, my literary works, and I hope you won't think that I am likely to suffer from ennui. Nor is Fanny any less active. Ill or well, rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to be observed howking about certain patches of garden. She comes in heated and bemired up to the eyebrows, late for every meal. She has reached a sort of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... earl! you're just in time to relieve Genevieve from the ennui of a solitary afternoon. I regret so much that we cannot stay with ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... of a torrential downpour which kept us house-bound till four in the afternoon. If one really wants to step back into the dark ages, just let him linger thirty-six hours as we did at Bethune. More would probably drive him crazy with ennui, but ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... girls, or go traveling, the summer would be delightful, but to stay at home with three selfish sisters and a grown-up boy was enough to try the patience of a Boaz," complained Miss Malaprop, after several days devoted to pleasure, fretting, and ennui. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... determination to enter upon a systematic and thorough course of study. The teacher who can do so must have within him the spirit of the reformer, and the earnestness that will enable him to arouse and to enthuse to action the numbers that are dying of lethargy and ennui. The teacher who can do this has here a field of labor extensive enough for the highest ambition, and may be repaid by a success grander than can be attained in the limited circle of the college ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... those whose excitability is thus exhausted. They therefore feel continual languor and listlessness, unless when under the influence of the stimulus which brought on the exhaustion. Every scene, however beautiful, is beheld with indifference by such patients, and the degree of ennui they feel is insupportable: this makes them have recourse to the stimulus which has exhausted their excitability, which in some degree removes this languor for a time; but it returns with redoubled strength, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... marriageable time,—or, rather, that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... let the King go on upon these subjects, and even, sometimes, to hear the same story three or four times over, if new persons came into the room. Madame de Pompadour never betrayed the least ennui. She even sometimes persuaded him to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "la grande vie!" To the man, every serious effort he is obliged to make trends toward one idea—that of the bon vivant—to gain success and fame, but to gain it with the idea of how much personal daily pleasure it will bring him. Ennui is a word one hears constantly; if it rains toute le monde est triste. To have one's gaiety interrupted is regarded as a calamity, and "tout le monde" will sympathize with you. To live a day without the pleasures of life in proportion ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... them beyond the need of effort, would do well to select some special study or employment to occupy and develop their mental life, and save them from the inanity, ennui, and selfishness that are sure to follow in the footsteps of idleness. Poverty of mind is rendered all the more prominent and disgusting if accompanied by external wealth; and to such a mind wealth is but a means to folly, if ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... very bad time—I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... of a dying girl who loves him, to live up to a high imaginary ideal of himself which her pure but mistaken mind has formed. He has a handsome face and sweet voice, and repeats what they tell him. Her long, slow decline and happy death, and his own inward ennui and profound weariness of the role he has to play, made the vivid points of the story. So far, well enough, but here was the trouble: through the whole narrative moved another character, a physician of tender heart and exquisite mercy, who practised ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... to the more intellectual emotions and faculties, which are very important, as forming the basis for the development of the higher mental powers. Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from ennui, as may be seen with dogs, and, according to Rengger, with monkeys. All animals feel Wonder and many exhibit Curiosity. They sometimes suffer from this latter quality, as when the hunter plays antics and thus attracts them; I have witnessed this with deer, and so it is with the wary ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... an absolute insult to us all, and as I saw at once was the work of Madame Croquelebois, accepted by the young Count as a convenient excuse for avoiding the ennui and expense of setting up a household with his wife, instead of living a gay bachelor life with his Prince. I did not even think it was his handwriting except the signature, an idea which gave the first ray of comfort to my poor sister-in-law. It was quite provoking ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... curiosity.] Incuriosity — N. incuriosity, incuriousness &c adj.; insouciance &c 866; indifference, lack of interest, disinterest. boredom, ennui (weariness) 841; satiety &c 639; foreknowledge (foresight) 510; V. be incurious &c adj.; have no curiosity &c 455; take no interest in &c 823; mind one's own business. Adj. incurious, uninquisitive, indifferent; impassive ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... got up betimes to shoot, Or hunt; the young, because they liked the sport The first thing boys like, after play and fruit; The middle-aged, to make the day more short; For ennui is a growth of English root, Though nameless in our language-we retort The fact for words, and let the French translate That awful yawn ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... that when he did not positively suffer he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation, are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The passing color of other men's minds is the prevailing cast of his, and he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... and Amaryllis had been disappointed in Philadelphus. Nothing tender or compassionate; only a little curiosity, a little rancor, a little ennui and a faint instinctive hope that something of interest might ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... imperious and willful, generous to a fault, impatient of all control; but her greatest fault, Mrs. Vyvian said, was a constant craving for excitement; a distaste for and dislike of quiet and retirement. She would ride the most restive horse, she would do anything to break the ennui and monotony of ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... round in groups, drinking their coffee; and bold spirits—Mr. Pix, for instance, ventured upon a cigar as well. Meanwhile, Anton roamed through the suite of rooms, looking at the paintings on the walls, turning over albums, and fighting off ennui as well as he could. In this way he reached the end room, and stopped there in amazement. Sabine stood before him, tears falling from her eyes. She was sobbing silently, her slender form shaken by the conflict within, but yet she was trying ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... saint. This man placed the university, which he had founded, in their hands; and about the same time they gained a footing in the university of Salamanca. Still they continued to retain their strongest hold upon the people, who regarded them as saviours from the tyranny and ennui of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... banished joy" says George Herbert. When the alma Venus, the life-giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by the Pagan world, could not save her followers from self- dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly: "Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience." Throughout ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... Sidney dear. And they will, some day. Then will come the new literature, the literature of good! And it will make people think, rather than relieve them from the ennui of solid thought, as our present novels do. The intellectual palate then will find only insipidity in such books as pour from our presses now. The ability to converse glibly about authors who wallow in human unrealities will then ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... not dying of ennui or spleen, or miserable and with a nameless fathomless misery. She was only disenchanted—conscious of feeling a great deal older than she had done six months since. How could she have been so credulous, so vain! Verily, every path of roses has ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... were her paying guests being kept from any possibilities of ennui and homesickness, but her good friends, the Carews, were becoming delightfully acquainted with her other good friends, the Pendletons. So, like a mother hen with a brood of chickens, she hovered over the veranda ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... alike to me, men, women, events. This is my true confession of faith, and I may add what you may not believe, which is that I do not care any more for myself than I do for the rest. All is divided into ennui, comedy and misery. I am indifferent to everything. I pass two-thirds of my time in being terribly bored. I pass the third portion in writing sentences which I sell as dear as I can, regretting that I have to ply ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of satyriasis, and even my anger against Miss T. turned to a prurient curiosity. At the same time I was not always able to adhere to my diet. But both as regards coition and diet I was still fighting, and on the whole successfully. My fits of temper, however, were excessive and my ennui became gloomy despair. One day I blasphemed on crossing the Park and spoke contemptuously of "God and his twopenny ha'penny revolving balls," referring to the planetary system. But for long walks I should have gone mad. A. was ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... love. I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside myself ... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action are active just because ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... picking his way along the snowy defiles of the mountains to attain again his luxurious home in Cuzco. Behind the adventurers lay companionship and society—represented by the dubious orgies of the House of Austria—and the security of civil government—represented by the mortal ennui of a Peruvian city. Before them lay difficulties and perhaps dangers, but also at least variety, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... of the structure and the orchestral frame. And, then, are not these confessions of intimate experiences, these moonlight sentimentalities, these listless dreams, &c., out of place in the gaslight glare of concert-rooms, crowded with audiences brought together to a great extent rather by ennui, vanity, and idle curiosity than by ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... and our own were not utterly uncertain. And if we knew with surety when we rose in the morning that for another forty years we would go on getting up, and having a bath and dressing, we would be apt to expire with ennui. We rise with alacrity because we don't know if we shall ever put our clothes ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... can hardly be expected. This year also, owing to scanty rains, sickness has been rife, and many cases which began with normal mildness have ended suddenly and fatally. Besides fear of fever, they are victims to ennui and nostalgia; and, expecting the Comptoir to pay large profits, they are greatly disappointed by ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the while of the universe," answered her husband. "Such an age-long howling of evil stupidities would be enough to turn its brain with ennui and disgust. Nevertheless, the hypocrite will certainly know himself discovered and shamed, and unable any longer to hide himself from his neighbor. His past deeds also will be made plain to all who, for further ends of rectification, require to know them. Shame will ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... in the day in reading, writing, business, or conversation; during these hours, children will naturally feel the want of occupation, and will, from sympathy, from ambition and from impatience of insupportable ennui, desire with anxious faces, "to have something to do." Instead of loading them with playthings, by way of relieving their misery, we should honestly tell them, if that be the truth, "I am sorry I cannot find any thing for you to do at present. I hope you will ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway's return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more uneasy as no sound came. No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... letters of the time: "The companions of my youth are indeed almost all departed; but I find an agreeable society among their children and grandchildren. I have public business enough to preserve me from ennui, and private amusement besides in conversation, books, my garden, and cribbage. Considering our well-furnished, plentiful market as the best of gardens, I am turning mine, in the midst of which my house stands, into grass plots ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... nothing more fit to be looked at than the outside of a book. It is, as I may say, from repeated experience, a pure and unmixed pleasure to have a goodly volume lying before you, and to know that you may open it if you please, and need not open it unless you please. It is a resource against ennui, if ennui should come upon you. To have the resource and not to feel the ennui, to enjoy your bottle in the present, and your book in the indefinite future, is a delightful condition of human existence. There is no place, in which a man can move or sit, in which the outside of ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... interest than if it had been the rattling court-yard to one of those hotels in which she spent her life. She saw it, but heeded it not. She seemed to be thinking of herself, or of something she desired, or of some one she had never met. There was ennui, and there was wistfulness, in her gaze. Yet one would have guessed these things to be transient—to be no more than the little shadows that sometimes pass between a bright mirror and ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... share, portion, part, participation; advantage, benefit, weal, behoof; usury. Antonyms: boredom, ennui, indifference, unconcern. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the sturdiest of Scotchmen, a most pleasant-mannered and unaffected man, sincere in whatever he did or said, who has lived at Zanzibar several years, subject to the infructuosities of the business he has been engaged in, as well as to the calor and ennui of the climate, who yet presents as formidable a front as ever to the apathetic native of Zanzibar. No man can charge Capt. H. C. Fraser, formerly of the Indian Navy, with ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... made to Delft, only twenty minutes distant from The Hague by rail. Pepys calls it "a most sweet town, with bridges and a river in every street," and that is a tolerably accurate description. It seems thinly inhabited, and the Dutch themselves look upon it as a place where one will die of ennui. It has scarcely changed with two hundred years. The view of Delft by Van der Meer in the Museum at The Hague might have been painted yesterday. All the trees are dipt, for in artificial Holland every work of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... sustained emotion; and its characters being drawn, without selection, from vulgar prototypes, would excite more disgust than interest. The drama?—but there the new theory of art becomes too ridiculous: a tragedy on such a plan would be received with alternate yawns of ennui and shouts of laughter. All these are pertinent questions; for fine art, in literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, forms a homogeneous circle under ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... began on another occasion, "I hope you are not dying of ennui, etc. Over here things are going so-so. He asked me yesterday to go with him to the Louvre, and we walked about among the pictures for half an hour. Mamma thinks it a very strange sort of thing for me to be doing, and ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... been taught to read or write, as the benefit of such accomplishments was not appreciated in any general way—at least so far as women were concerned; but, once within the convent walls, from sheer ennui, Archangela began to study most assiduously, and finally published a number of books which present an interesting description and criticism of existing manners and customs in so far as they had to ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... and sunlight, and needs no fictitious stimulant. We love, we desire, we possess; and then? We tire, you say? These southern races are so fickle! All wrong—we are less tired than you deem. And do not Englishmen tire? Have they no secret ennui at times when sitting in the chimney nook of "home, sweet home," with their fat wives and ever-spreading families? Truly, yes! But they are ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... the climate would do her good. In New York she had troops of friends, but she suddenly became eager to see again the very small number of those who lived on the Potomac. It was only to her closest intimates that she honestly acknowledged herself to be tortured by ennui. Since her husband's death, five years before, she had lost her taste for New York society; she had felt no interest in the price of stocks, and very little in the men who dealt in them; she had become serious. ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... lost Macedonia, might have spent his days peacefully ruling his own subjects in Epirus; but he could not endure repose, thinking that not to trouble others and be troubled by them was a life of unbearable ennui, and, like Achilles ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... flood which overwhelms it, I have often seen men, constantly spurred on by their wants and desires, remain in idleness, in order not to lose the esteem of their equals; and I have known them submit to ennui and privations rather than to work. No one can fail to perceive that these opposite obligations are two different rules of conduct, both nevertheless originating in ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... I am a bachelor; I have no wife, no daughter, no domestic ties of any sort to beguile my restless nature and render me content to settle down in the monotonous placidity of a home; I must always be occupied in some exciting pursuit, or I should go mad from very weariness and ennui; and since our memorable cruise in your Flying Fish, I have been unable to find anything exciting and adventurous enough to suit my taste. That cruise has spoilt me for everything else, and I am sometimes ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... produces, and though his books may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty, mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Frenchwoman goes into the country for the purpose of enjoying the fresh air, she reads a little to kill time, and occupies much of it with her embroidery and other fancy works, and after a short period passed amongst the vine-clad hills, sighs once more to return to her dear Paris, complains of ennui, wonders what the fashions will be at the next Longchamp, and whether they will be such as become her or not, but feeling herself bound to wear whatever may be pronounced the modes, and trusts to her taste to arrange it in such a manner as to set ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... This is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our part, we are slow to believe that ever any man did or could learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. True it is that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance, hospital patients) who have not afterward courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; but that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence in ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... never spoke of his former occupations, never showed the least regret for the promise he had given not to renew his researches, he grew to have the melancholy motions, the feeble voice, the depression of a sick person. The ennui that possessed him showed at times in the very manner with which he picked up the tongs and built fantastic pyramids in the fire with bits of coal, utterly unconscious of what he was doing. When night came he was evidently relieved; sleep no doubt released him from the importunities of ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... Although it leaves him sufficiently wretched, and he has taken it but rarely, the drug occasionally keeps him wide awake and delightfully indifferent to the passage of time. The striking hours are heard, and that is all. There is none of the ennui of insomnia. This effect of morphia is rare with him. He may have taken morphia a dozen times in his life to ease acute pain, but only twice has it made him thus wakeful. On these nights he saw an endless succession of ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... him, her chin upon her ungloved hand. Was there pose in these depictions of Mr. Hugo Canning as a morose recluse? She thought not: his light bitterness rang true enough, the note of a man really half-desperate with ennui. And she read his remarks as a subtle sign of his confidence, an acknowledgment of acquaintance ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... parts to sing, better dressing-rooms, better hotel quarters, better everything than the others had, and with the unhappy and excited Monsieur Noire he shared this unending strife. At first he saw it all in a humorous light, but, by and by, he came to a period of ennui and tried to rebel. This period gave him more trouble than the other, so within a short time he lapsed into an apathetic complaint-receptacle and dreamed no more of walking or riding to and from the hotel without ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... the country characters and setting had become mere disguises, sometimes allegorical, for the expression of the very far from simple sentiments of the upper classes, and sometimes for their partly genuine longing, the outgrowth of sophisticated weariness and ennui, for rural naturalness. Sidney's very complicated tale of adventures in love and war, much longer than any of its successors, is by no means free from artificiality, but it finely mirrors his own knightly spirit and remains a permanent English classic. Among his followers ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of sport are for the leisure classes a substitute for productive labor which a physiological necessity imposes upon them, in order that they may escape the detrimental consequences of absolute repose and ennui. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... have recognized the mind, but not the soul, which is greater than the mind. It had no aspirations for future happiness; it had no fears of future misery. Hence the frequency of suicide under disappointment, or ennui, or satiated desire, or fear of poverty, or ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... seeing his friends, in order that his wife may go to those places for which she has a special affection. Not infrequently he gives up a journey much farther afield for the purpose of pursuing antiquarian researches because he knows how great would be her ennui were she to accompany him, and he is ever full of a tender concern that she shall suffer no unnecessary ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... introduction to the description of it. "C'est un usage qui ne remonte pas plus haut que ce voyage celebre de Gama, qui a fourni au Camoens le sujet de la Lusiade. L'idee qu'on ne scauroit etre un bon marin, sans avoir traverse l'Equateur, l'ennui inseparable d'une longue navigation, un certain esprit republicain qui regne dans toutes les petites societes, peut-etre toutes ces causes reunies, ont pu donner naissance a ces especes de saturnales. Quoiqu'il en soi, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... to the minister, "are like schoolboys. If you want them to work well you must divert their minds, and give them something to think about and look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... the sixteenth century meant something fuller than, and somewhat different from the word "ennui" to-day. It was a weariness which had ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... to say nothing at all, and, during the third moment, only to say, "The devil alone knows what he is!" And should, thereafter, one not hasten to depart, one would inevitably become overpowered with the deadly sense of ennui which comes of the intuition that nothing in the least interesting is to be looked for, but only a series of wearisome utterances of the kind which are apt to fall from the lips of a man whose hobby has once been ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... round General Feraud with infinite respect. He, himself, imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... and visited his comrades, with the exception, of course, of Bublitsyn; but in spite of the exaggerated approbation of Onisim, he almost went out of his mind at last from wretchedness, jealousy, and ennui. Conversations with Onisim about Vassilissa were the only thing that afforded him some consolation. The conversation was always begun, 'scratched up,' by ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... son of an ancient, proud, decaying house, poor as poverty. Don Fernando had been in Paris, knew by hearsay England, and had heard Scotland mentioned. Spaniard and Scot drank together. The former was drawn into almost love of Ian. Here was a help against boundless ennui! Ian and his horse, and the small mail strapped behind the saddle, finally went off with Don Fernando to spend a week in his old house on the hillside just without the town. Here was poverty also, but yet sufficient acres ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... jump, but not with weariness. They jump to get into action again. From a life of too much excitement I have gone to the other extreme. I shall be dead of ennui in ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... they have not the power to make any one fall in love with them, they are on the outside of the discussion now before us. If they are unhappy enough to receive no attention for the sake of amiability, they are soon seized with ennui; they fall back upon religion, upon the cultivation of pets, cats, lap-dogs, and other fancies which are no ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the former, and did not make his appearance till the next day. I now had recovered my strength, and determined to take some decided measures, but how to act I knew not. I reflected all night, and the next morning (that is, according to my supposition) I attacked the basket. Whether it was that ennui or weakness occasioned it, I cannot tell, but either way, I drank too much wine, and was ready for any daring deed, when ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... it all—all—all!" said Bianca, as she swallowed the last drop of her coffee, and threw herself on the sofa in an attitude of languor and ennui. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Encke (of comet fame), L. Euler, the brothers Grimm, the two Humboldts, Lachmann, Lagrange, Leibnitz, T. Mommsen, J. Muller, G. Niebuhr, C. Ritter (the geographer), Savigny and Zumpt. Frederick II. presented in 1768 A Dissertation on Ennui. To the Berlin Academy we owe the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mus' kill you I shall do so. Otherwise I have sufficient trouble to keep me from ennui. My frien', I am going home to enjoy my property. If you live or die it signifies nothing to me. No! Why, for the pleasure of killing you, should I bring your ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive—but that is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... thought of the priesthood, blushed when he ran across any of those tender and exquisite old verses he had written in his youth, and became addicted to absinthe and other less peculiar drinks, and to gaming a little to escape a madness of ennui. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... Superintendent of Finance, with his eye for the beautiful and desire for the luxury of kings, built for himself such a chateau as only the magnificence of that time produced. It was situated far enough from Paris to escape any sort of ennui, and was surrounded by gardens most marvellous, within a beauteous park. It lay, when finished, like a jewel on the fair bosom of France. The great superintendent conceived the idea of pleasing the young king, Louis XIV, by inviting the court for a wondrous fete ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough. Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through darkest Thibet." She ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... against ennui on rainy days and foggy days and days that were going to clear up later. All these sorts were devised by the malignity of Providence for the confusion of small boys yearning to be on active service, redistributing property, obstructing traffic, or calling attention ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of overbearing pride assumed by one who is sick to the backbone? And the whole moving with such rapidity and confusion that it is disguised and masked— sordid impotence, devouring dissension, assiduous ennui, dishonest distress! The appearance of present-day humanity is all appearance, and nothing else: in what he now represents man himself has become obscured and concealed; and the vestiges of the creative faculty in art, which still cling to such countries as France ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... finding his time after dinner hang somewhat heavy on his hand, and the moon being tolerably bright, had, one harvest evening, sought his usual remedy for dispelling ennui by a walk to the Manse, where he was sure, that, if he could not succeed in engaging the minister himself in some disputation, he would at least find something in the establishment to animadvert upon ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... little as it occurs to others in her situation to investigate the laws of the senses through which the pleasure is to be obtained. There is a whole moral philosophy to be extracted from the little word "ennui" by those who know; but Helen was not of the knowing. She believed that when she was tired of the horses she could delight herself with her beautiful house, and that when she was tired of the house she could have a new one. All her life she had been deriving ecstasy from beautiful ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... But Ennui finds entrance into every scene, when the gloss of novelty is over; and the fiend began to seize upon Mr. Touchwood just when he had got all matters to his mind in the Cleikum Inn—had instructed ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... heard sounds more pitiful than those old passionate groans of hers. What was your prayer, poor old wretched soul? The gendarmes hemmed her round, and hustled her away, but rather kindly. The Padishah went on quite impassible—the picture of debauch and ennui. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a bore for me I shall have to marry an heiress?" the Duke said, pathetically. "Marriage is the most tiresome ennui at any time, but to be forced through sheer beggary to take some ugly woman you don't like and don't want is cruel hard luck, ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... ennui and kindle into attentiveness, then soulfulness as he swayed them with the touch of his fingers on the keys was no mean triumph. To draw men out of lolling ease into tense and unconsidered attitudes; to cause women's lips to part and their pupils ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... passed away with ineffable tedium. At one time she was so beaten down by ennui that she almost offered her assistance to her sister in reference to the wedding garments. In spite of the very bitter words which had been spoken in the morning she would have done so had Sophy afforded her the slightest opportunity. But Sophy was heartlessly cruel in her indifference. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... substance of Arnold's thought is characterized by a deep seriousness; no one felt more deeply the spiritual unrest and distraction of his age. More than one poem is an expression of its mental and spiritual sickness, its doubt, ennui, and melancholy. Yet beside such poems as Dover Beach and Stagirius should be placed the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... humor, and agreeable conversation. In the intervals of our daily duties, we amused ourselves with music and reading; having some instruments and a choice library. Otherwise we should have passed our time in a state of insufferable ennui, at this rainy season, in the midst of the deep mud which surrounded us, and which interdicted the pleasure of ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... cared for little but to be happy. Handsome, brave and rich, Nature had done so much for him that Henri often regretted that she had left so little for him to add. The king knew his men well, for he was remarkably clear-sighted: and though often betrayed, was never deceived. But ennui was the curse of his life; he was ennuye now, and was wondering if any one would come and amuse him, when M. le Duc d'Epernon ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... that it was to her pen that Lady Mary had recourse in her endeavours to overcome ennui. A perusal of the letters written during this first sojourn in Europe shows that nothing escaped her eye, trivial or serious, from the washing of the Rotterdam pavements to the dwarfs at the Court of Vienna, from the palaces of the great to the ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... cured of longing for that self-forbidden city in the North. He desired it—he desired the arid wilderness of its treeless streets, its incessant sounds, its restless energy; he desired its pleasures, its frivolous days and nights, its satiated security, its ennui. Its life had been his life, its people his people, and he longed for it with ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... girl of southern Spain, who says 'yes, yes,' and 'no, no,' as her parents wish, and looks down on the ground while life passes? Only to think of being like that is enough to make a woman grow a moustache and have an embonpoint out of sheer ennui. It's my Irish heart which keeps my father and brother alive; and when I want to do a thing they hurry to let me do it lest I have a fit—of ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... suppose, from the fear of ennui which seems to cloud your future, that Mary and I had not succeeded so happily as we imagined, in our efforts ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... Soo of Finance would have been a more accurate title. As a juggler with other people's money he was at the head of his class. And yet, when one came to examine it, his method was delightfully simple. Say, for instance, that the Home-grown Tobacco Trust, founded by Geoffrey in a moment of ennui, failed to yield those profits which the glowing prospectus had led the public to expect. Geoffrey would appease the excited shareholders by giving them Preference Shares (interest guaranteed) in the Sea-gold Extraction Company, hastily floated to meet the emergency. When the interest ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... wonderful night, while he was left solitary to eat out his heart beneath the moon. He did not reason against his feelings and tell himself they were absurd. The dancing faun does not reason in his moments of ennui. He rebels. ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... give up all gaiety and pleasure because of her change of heart. But Jean took her away from the court and all of its dissipations and dangers and brought her here to the old chateau, where she was literally buried alive in stupidity and ennui. ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... was declined with thanks: and perhaps he was not sorry; being weak and languid and in no danger of suffering from ennui with horses to ride and plenty of ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... effervescent, efficacious, effrontery, effulgence, effusion, egregious, eleemosynary, elicit, elite, elucidate, embellish, embryonic, emendation, emissary, emission, emollient, empiric, empyreal, emulous, encomium, endue, enervate, enfilade, enigmatic, ennui, enunciate, environ, epicure, epigram, episode, epistolary, epitome, equestrian, equilibrium, equinoctial, equity, equivocate, eradicate, erosion, erotic, erudition, eruptive, eschew, esoteric, espousal, estrange, ethereal, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... court episode du mauvais temps, ces trois semaines me font l'effet d'un charmant reve, d'un conte de fee, d'une promenade imaginaire a travers une salle immense, tout or et lapis-lazuli. Pas un moment d'ennui ou d'impatience. Si vous voulez abreger les longueurs d'une grande traversee, distribuez bien votre temps, et observez le reglement que vous vous etes impose. C'est un moyen sur de se faire promptement a la vie ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... into a lower and narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion was not friendship, but love; ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... et dedans sa mmoire Enfermer un ennui, N'est-ce pas se har pour acqurir la gloire De bien ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... had she been protected? He felt a mounting anger against the social ennui which drove men's minds to such inhuman activity. Departure was the only escape from this kind of thing, and from the ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... show pieces at the piano, and where they spoke a language he did not understand. He was quite aware of his worldly inaptitude, and that he was considered awkward, dull, and ill-tempered, and the knowledge of this fact paralyzed and frightened him still more. He could not disguise his feeling of ennui sufficiently to prevent the provincial circles from being greatly offended; they declared unanimously that young de Buxieres was a bear, and decided to leave him alone. The death of his father, which happened just as ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... judgement'. He has to confess that a military motive for Vocula's inaction is hard to find. Tacitus, feeling the same, offers a merely human motive. Soldiers of fortune often prefer war to final victory, and in these days the dangers of peace were only equalled by its ennui. Besides, Tacitus' explanation lends itself to an epigram which he would doubtless not have exchanged for the tedium of ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... in which it was conventionally fixed for posterity. But the manufacture of city-chronicles of course did not suspend its activity; it continued to supply its contributions both in prose and verse to the great library written by ennui for ennui, while the makers of the books, in part already freedmen, did not trouble themselves at all about research properly so called. Such of these writings as are mentioned to us—not one of them is preserved—seem ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... distant chair, and was coldly regarding the scene with ennui plastered thick upon him. Cherokee, lingering with his original idea, went over and ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... of ennui was, in fact, driving him out upon society; and the hopes of his sister, which had drooped somewhat after their first leaving-out, now began to lift themselves again. Jane, on reviewing Rosy's debut, had arrived at a juster estimate of her own share ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... My Lords, an epidemic of measles, a general election, and the like. I don't say these men are unhappy, but unless they develop a hobby, torpidity is bound to settle like a mist upon their brains. Such studies as geology, botany, and gardening, are sovereign for driving off the vapours of ennui. Nor are golf, angling, and the composition of verse, specifics that the rural ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... quizzing smile. The second condition of "comme il faut"-ness was long nails that were well kept and clean; the third, ability to bow, dance, and converse; the fourth—and a very important one—indifference to everything, and a constant air of refined, supercilious ennui. Moreover, there were certain general signs which, I considered, enabled me to tell, without actually speaking to a man, the class to which he belonged. Chief among these signs (the others being the fittings of his rooms, his gloves, his handwriting, his turn-out, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... with us are different institutions. Here, where thousands for want of thought, or rather matter for thought, would die of ennui, where it is an object to escape from home and even from one's self, the theatre serves the purpose of a momentary excitement. A new piece, a new performer, furnishes matter for conversation and turns off the mind from the discussion of points of theology or ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... chronicled old exotic memories or manipulated the journal of new travels. "Le Roman d'un Spahi," a record of the melancholy adventures of a soldier in Senegambia, belongs to 1881. In 1882 Loti issued a collection of short studies under the general title of "Fleurs d'Ennui." In 1883 he achieved the widest celebrity, for not only did he publish "Mon Frere Yves," a novel describing the life of a French bluejacket in all parts of the world—perhaps, on the whole, to this day ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... thousand of the best and most philosophical of human beings you could find in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, or even Boston, and place them as citizens in the beatified community, my belief is, that in less than a year they would either die of ennui, or attempt some revolution by which they would militate against the good of the community, and be burnt into cinders at the ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... were plastic I see how a great sculptor by but few strokes could convert it into an agonizing Stephen or Sebastian. As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalized him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, forever hungry; until the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... book which may be read with as much delight, and surely with more advantage than the works of those who endeavour to destroy our belief. Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think must frequently suffer from ennui. ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... glasses let down, so that the people could distinctly see their sovereign, Louis XIII, who, pale as a ghost and dressed all in black, sat as motionless as an effigy in wax. Long, dark brown hair fell about his mournful, ghastly countenance, upon which was depicted the same terrible ennui that drove Philip II of Spain, to seclude himself so much, during the later years of his life, in the silence and solitude of the dreary Escorial. His eyes were fixed on vacancy, and seemed utterly lifeless—no desire, no thought, no will lent them ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... frighten me into marriage," thought the Marquise after their conversation; "she wants some spectacular ceremony to enliven the house for a season, and cure her ennui; Paris has been a disappointment, and Loris is making himself ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... it is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to ennui. There's no man so instantaneously bored. What activity does this singular constitution in all cases produce! All who are sensitive to ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man. Anything ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... he had spent a good deal of time, first and last, reviling Fate for not having endowed him with some talent upon which he could concentrate his energies, and with which attain distinction and find balm for his ennui. His grandmother had cherished the conviction that he was an undeveloped genius; but in regard to what particular field his genius was to enrich, she had never clearly expressed herself, and his own consciousness had not been more explicit. He had long ago made up ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... that the observations already made in this book, and in those which follow, will be of a nature to destroy the opinion which frivolous men maintain, namely that marriage is a sinecure. According to our view, a husband who gives way to ennui is a heretic, and more than that, he is a man who lives quite out of sympathy with the marriage state, of whose importance he has no conception. In this connection, these Meditations perhaps will reveal to very many ignorant men the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... The writings of the Roman philologers seem to bear evidence of this fact. Seneca, when an old man, says that, "if you are fond of books, you will escape the ennui of life; you will neither sigh for evening, disgusted with the occupations of the day—nor will you live dissatisfied with yourself, or unprofitable to others." De Tranquilitate, ch. 3. Cicero has positively told us that "study is the food ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of tales of fashionable life came out in 1809, and contained among other stories 'Ennui,' one of the most remarkable of Miss Edgeworth's works. The second series included the 'Absentee,' that delightful story of which the lesson should be impressed upon us even more than in the year 1812. The 'Absentee' ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society — all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... make life happy; an ample fortune, affectionate family, fame never contested, the consciousness of great powers nobly applied—"I have never through life," said he in his old age, "had a chagrin, still less an hour of ennui. I waken in the morning with a secret pleasure at beholding the light. I gaze upon it with species of ravishment. All the day I am content. In the evening when I retire to rest, I fall into a sort of reverie which prevents the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... now. What martyrdom endurest thou! What kind of life is this to be living, Ennui to thyself and youngsters giving? Let Neighbor Belly that way go! To stay here threshing straw why car'st thou? The best that thou canst think and know To tell the boys not for the whole world dar'st thou. E'en now I hear one in ...
— Faust • Goethe
... instead," said Ydo, with charming penitence. "But I was the Gipsy to-night in heart and feeling. I had to put on these. Oh," throwing herself into a chair, "I have suffered to-day. It has been coming on for days. Ennui. Do you know it, pretty lady? And the longing for mine ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... after every play. There was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the bronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia. ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... kind friend, you have a hundredfold right to appreciate and to relish the present musical Russia. Rimski-Korsakoff, Cui, Borodine, Balakireff, are masters of striking originality and worth. Their works make up to me for the ennui caused to me by other works more widely spread and more talked about, works of which I should have some difficulty in saying what Leonard once wrote to you from Amsterdam after a song of Schumann's: ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... found to do. A lady of one-and-twenty, and a gentleman of sixty-six, alone in a great castle, have not unfrequently a third guest at their table, who comes without a card, and whom they cannot shut out, though they keep their doors closed ever so. His name is Ennui, and many a long hour and weary night must such folks pass in the unbidden society of this Old Man of the Sea; this daily guest at the board; this watchful attendant at the fireside; this assiduous companion who will walk out with you; this ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that you should live on a housetop and eat cheese? Do you long for a cool stream without flies, and a carpet of golden sand? Do you want a coal fire and a husband home at six-thirty, or a third-class ticket to the realms of nonsense? Are you thinking of Lane's income, or Smith's cleverness, or the ennui of ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... the cheeks of Master No-book while watching this scene, and remembering that if he had known what was best for him, he might have been as happy as the happiest of these excellent boys, instead of suffering ennui and weariness, as he had done at the fairy Do-nothing's, ending in a miserable death. But his attention was soon after most alarmingly roused by hearing the giant Snap-'em-up again in conversation with his cook, who said that, if he wished for a good large ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... afternoon trade winds by the opposite side of the court. But Susy did not seem inclined to linger there long that morning, in spite of Mrs. Peyton's evident desire for a maternal tete-a-tete. The nervous preoccupation and capricious ennui of an indulged child showed in her pretty but discontented face, and knit her curved eyebrows, and Peyton saw a look of pain pass over his wife's face as the young girl suddenly and half-laughingly broke away and fluttered off towards ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... philanthropic enterprise. Still, a residue remains even of girls of this class whose own inclinations, or whose family circumstances, lead to an aimless, purposeless existence, productive of much injury to both body and mind, and only too likely to end in hopeless ennui and nervous troubles. It should be thoroughly understood by parents and guardians that no matter what the girl's circumstances may be, she ought always to have an abundance of employment. The ideas of obligation and of duty should not be discarded when school and college ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... the rest she resigned herself to her fate. Gradually sinking into extreme old age, her self-repression and her bitterness grew ever more and more complete. She was always bored; and her later letters are a series of variations on the perpetual theme of 'ennui.' 'C'est une maladie de l'ame,' she says, 'dont nous afflige la nature en nous donnant l'existence; c'est le ver solitaire qui absorbe tout.' And again, 'l'ennui est l'avant-gout du neant, mais le neant lui est preferable.' ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... happiness—1. A life full of work.—Happiness should not be the main object of pursuit 19 Carlyle on Ennui 20 2. Aim rather at avoiding suffering than attaining pleasure 21 3. The greatest pleasures and pains in spheres accessible to all 22 4. Importance and difficulty of realising our blessings while they last 24 Comparison and contrast 26 Content not the quality of progressive ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... months off—with pay—if we will only do the younger generation the favor of pounding a modicum of knowledge into their heads. During that time, if we are very careful, we can try to prevent our muscles from going to flab and our brains from corroding with ennui, so that when we again debark into the infinite sea of emptiness which surrounds us to pursue our chosen profession, we don't get killed on the ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... diligence or giving up work. When some one asked him why he consented to remain so long alive—"I have no fault," said he, "to find with old age." That was a noble answer, and worthy of a scholar. For fools impute their own frailties and guilt to old age, contrary to the practice of Ennui, whom I mentioned just now. ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... streets, on the quays, even in the Seine, even in the sky. Ah! mud is a fine thing when you're downhearted. I would like to dabble in it, to mould a statue with it, a statue one hundred feet high, and call it, 'My Ennui.'" ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... a victorious conspiracy, of rearing in France the standard of the monarchy—all this was too dazzling not to captivate a young and high-spirited woman, bold through very ignorance of the obstacles she had to surmount, heroic in the hour of danger through levity; able to endure all but ennui, and ready to lull any misgivings with the casuistry of a ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Allow me therefore to exculpate myself. I am a woman who, since childhood, has had to labour for my livelihood and for that of those I love. You can know nothing of what that labour of the artist's life entails,—interminable journeys, suffocating ennui, the unwholesome monotony and publicity of a life passed in hotels and trains. It was not fit that a young and growing girl should share that life. As much as has been possible I have guarded Karen from its ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... that of the savage, who can imagine no obstacles that are not solid and tangible. The obstacles that retard our progress in life neither display yawning chasms nor rows of teeth; they dwell within our own minds—they are versatility, disgust, ennui, thirst after the unknown, and love of change. These lead us to take bye-paths and long turnings, and fritter away the strength that should be used in promoting a single aim. Hence arise a multiplicity of hermaphrodite avocations and desultory ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien |
