He had let age take hold of him, as if ennui was an old…

Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source…

— Steven Erikson

I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly,…

— Henry Adams

If you want to live in 'white world,' if you want to experience the stultifying boredom and penetrating ennui that homogeneity can bring, you…

— Greg Proops

“It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here…

— Cynthia Ozick

As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds.

— Charles Caleb Colton

“She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.”

— Michael Cunningham

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

— Emile M. Cioran

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth…

— Beryl Markham

You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.

— Samuel Johnson

“Sitting to think of what to write will only set your ass on fire, give you headache, twist your face to look stupid, instead,…

— Michael Bassey Johnson

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.

— Anonymous

In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation…

— Rebecca Solnit

Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from…

— Russell Kirk