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More "Ennui" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... not look as though we should be thrust entirely upon our own resources in the country; but at the worst we had resources within our own walls and fences that would fend off all but the most violent attacks of ennui. ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... houn's? I hae nae doubt he is, for a fox is no sae complete a coward as to think huntin' cruel; and his haill nature is then on the alert, which in itsel' is happiness. Huntin' him fa'in into languor and ennui, and growin' ower fat on how-towdies (barn-door fowls). He's no ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... and stared, in a sort of sinister fascination. He thought that he might stare for ever. At length, after ages of ennui, he loosed himself from the spell with an effort and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... he had 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
... Scottish manners as the other is of those of Ireland; and that we are far from placing on the same level the merits and qualities of the works. Waverley is of a much higher strain, and may be safely placed far above the amusing vulgarity of Castle Rack-rent, and by the side of Ennui or the Absentee, the best ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... occupation is as essential for the happiness and wellbeing of woman as of man. Without it, women are apt to sink into a state of listless ENNUI and uselessness, accompanied by sick headache and attacks of "nerves." Caroline Perthes carefully warned her married daughter Louisa to beware of giving way to such listlessness. "I myself," she said, "when the children are gone out for ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... me from ennui," he answered, yawning. "Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... so, indeed!" said he. "I have often thought that if I were made a prisoner, I should die of ennui. How people can exist shut up within the walls of a dungeon has always ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... that," said I; "we are at the commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages: that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, in Armenian, and ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... is that we were afraid you might complain of ennui, so we have stirred up a little excitement," ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... pictures of manners are true, but not sufficiently elevated above the range of every-day life; he has exhausted the surface of life; and as there is little progression in his dramas, and every thing turns usually on the same point, this adds to the impression of shallowness and ennui, as characteristic of the existing state of society. Willingly would he have abolished masks altogether, but he could hardly have compensated for them out of his own resources; however, he retained only a few of them, as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... doctrine; she cannot admit it, and, fired by a desire to devote herself body and soul to some useful work, she chooses the laborious profession of a school-mistress in the village. But this humble and unpleasant career does not satisfy her. Little by little ennui and anguish ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... is, and hard of heart, and like to die of ennui at times. And hence it welcomes with pathetic joy all who can bring some new fancy or trick to their castle-building, rejecting all other without remorse. To this World of Fashion Iola had offered herself, giving freely ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Harrison had amused himself that Thanksgiving day! perhaps in terror of his old enemy, ennui. At least ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... arrache un orme dans la plaine Et jette son epee, et Roland, plein d'ennui, L'attaque. Il n'aimait pas qu'on vint faire apres lui Les generosites qu'il ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... cette vie, et que ce soit ici notre patrie, notre origine, et la seul felicite que nous pouvons nous promettre, pourquoi n'y sommes-nous pas heureux? Si nous ne naissons que pour les plaisirs des sens, pourquoi ne peuvent-ils nous satisfaire, et laissent-ils toujours un fond d'ennui et de tristesse dans notre coeur? Si l'homme n'a rien au- dessus de la bete, que ne coule-t-il ses jours comme elle, sans souci, sans inquietude, sans degout, sans tristesse, dans la felicite des sens et ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... filthy? What mud! It's everywhere, in the 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
... of the Court, and Lady Merceron could not quite understand why Charlie had tired so soon of his excursion, or why his friend persisted with so much fervor that anything was better than London, and the Court was the most charming place he had ever seen. Of the two Charlie seemed to feel the ennui much the more severely. Yet, while Mr. Wentworth spoke of returning to town in a few weeks, Charlie asseverated that he had paid his last visit to that revolting and disappointing place. Lady Merceron wished she had Uncle Van by her side to explain these puzzling ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... two or three times I lost my way, and no cab was to be had at any price. The few cabmen then in the streets were leading their animals slowly along, making for their stables. It was one of those depressing London days which filled me with ennui and a yearning for my own clear city of Paris, where, if we are ever visited by a slight mist, it is at least clean, white vapour, and not this horrible London mixture saturated with suffocating carbon. The fog was too thick for any passer ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... 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. ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... each other; M. de Caulaincourt liberally passing for all the Ministers, through the French advanced posts, convoys of all the good cheer in epicurean wises, etc., that Paris could afford; nor was female society wanting to complete the charm and banish ennui from the Chatillon Congress, which I am sure will be long recollected with sensations of pleasure by all the Plenipotentiaries there ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Long before sheer ennui forced her to look out of the window again, every sign of justice had been removed from the square. Nothing whatever remained in the heavy August sunshine save gathered heaps of filth where the horses ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... "Good-by," and Will quitted the house, striking across the fields so as not to run any risk of encountering Mr. Casaubon's carriage, which, however, did not appear at the gate until four o'clock. That was an unpropitious hour for coming home: it was too early to gain the moral support under ennui of dressing his person for dinner, and too late to undress his mind of the day's frivolous ceremony and affairs, so as to be prepared for a good plunge into the serious business of study. On such occasions he usually threw ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... invariable and uncontested, there will be opportunity to find out later. Meantime, this dual condition was productive of not a little harmless entertainment to Mr. Helwyse, at times when persons less happily organized would become victims of ennui. Be the conditions what they might, he was never without a companion, whose ways he knew, and whom he was yet never weary of questioning and studying. No subject so dull that its different aspects, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... police required in that country; there was no pickpockets, as there were no pockets to pick—which was one advantage in favour of nudity. A London police magistrate would have died of ennui; the constables could not even have sworn to a case of intoxication, merely as a matter of form to afford employment. There were no immoral females to disgrace the public streets; neither were there any beggars, ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... she also well this morning? How pleased you both were to see me yesterday!" assuming an insolent, albeit watchful, pose. "So you believed I had run away from the duke? As if he could get on without me. What would be a honeymoon without Triboulet! The maids of honor would die of ennui. One day they trick me out with true-lovers' knots! the next, give me a Cupid's head for a wand. Leave the duke!" he repeated, bombastically. "Triboulet could not ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... spirits, the ubiquitous McGuntrie, Van Blarcom, the young reservist Pietro Ricci,—a very good sort of fellow,—and I were herded together beyond escape. Also, a foursome at bridge seemed divinely indicated by our number, and to avert a sheer paralysis of ennui we formed the habit of winning each other's money at ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... soul she longed to be loved,—but what she understood by love was a much purer and more exalted emotion than is common among men and women. She was suffering just now from an intense and overpowering ennui. Rome was beautiful, she averred, but dull. Stretching her fair white arms out over the impervious stone- angels she said this, and more than this, to someone within the room, who answered her in one of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Boulevard Italien without wonder, hatred, love, joy or sorrow. On consulting my inmost thoughts I found there an unimpassioned serenity, a something akin to ennui; I scarcely heard the noise of the wheels, the horses—the crowd that ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... moved nervously, each one hoping to be called. Then, as the door into the private offices closed, the ones left behind fell back with sighs to the magazines and illustrated papers with which they sought to distract their fears or their ennui. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... that, if persisted in, it is liable to lead to insanity, how much more quickly must that unfortunate condition have been induced when the trials of religious distress and the physical enfeeblement arising from rigorous fastings and incessant watchings were added? To the dreadful ennui which precedes that state, one of the ancient monks pathetically alludes when he relates how often he went forth and returned to his cell, and gazed on the sun as if he hastened too slowly to his setting. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... was a rhythm rather than a tune it was not rag-time. Rag-time Stonehouse appreciated. He recognized it as a symptom of the mal du siecle, a deliberate break with the natural rhythm of life, a desperate ennui, the hysterical pressure upon an aching cancer. Ragtime twitched at the nerves. This thing jostled you, bustled you. It was a shout—a caper—the ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay of its day, riotous and vulgar. It was the sort of thing coster-women danced to on the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... camp to prevent any danger of ennui. The probability of battle gave the daily drills an interest that they never could gain in Ohio. The native Rebels were numerous and defiant, and kept up such demonstrations as led to continual apprehensions of an attack. New regiments ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... yesterday from my dear Misis. I have not heard to-day. It brings back all my uneasiness. Has he slept well to-night? is he not fatigued? I hope he has nothing else to complain of but ennui. My dear Misis, I do not doubt that you think of your dear Fanny, of her grief, her love, her impatience. Tell me the day, then, the day I so long for, that is to bring you back to me again. All my thoughts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... ourselves, had robbed him a bit. He had grown thin, lost his broad and beaming smiles, and had taken to dressing in canvas. Ivan Petrovitch from time to time visited Groholsky's villa. He brought Liza jam, sweets, and fruit, and seemed trying to dispel her ennui. Groholsky was not troubled by these visits, especially as they were brief and infrequent, and were apparently paid on account of Mishutka, who could not under any circumstances have been altogether deprived of the privilege of seeing his mother. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... at noon the next day, and to tread, like a mill horse, the same trodden circle over again. Thus the days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... enough to give him a chance to see the cows in their winter quarters. Clytie Summers had begged very prettily for her glimpse too of the country at this time of year. "It's rather soon, I know, for that spring barn-yard; but I should so enjoy the ennui of some village Main Street in the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... care for the toast and the kettle, but I do envy you your good spirits, Polly," said Fanny, as the merriment subsided. "I 'm so tired of everybody and everything, it seems sometimes as if I should die of ennui. ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... naissant murit, de la faux respecte; Sans crainte du pressoir, le pampre tout l'ete Boit les doux presents de l'aurore; Et moi, comme lui belle, et jeune comme lui, {272} Quoique l'heure presente ait de trouble et d'ennui, Je ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... which fell numbers of blue foxes, the valuable fur of which served as a protection against cold, while their flesh enabled the sailors to economize their provisions. Always cheerful and good tempered, they bore equally well the ennui of the long polar night, and the severity of the cold, which was so extreme, that during two of three days, when they had not been able to keep so large a fire as usual, on account of the smoke being driven back again by the wind, it froze so hard in the house, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... behind the scenes. I like to contemplate society in this way occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it, it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and ennui of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere spectator is amusing. I am glad, therefore, that I brought no letters to Prague. I shall leave it with a favorable idea of its society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of either; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... man spelled energy at bay, forces rusting, ennui past telling. But force still dominated. Force showed in the close-cropped, black hair and the small ears set close to the head; in the corded throat and heavy jaws; in the well-muscled shoulders, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the deliberate marches of the plodding horse, and the endless rocking of the dromedary that knoweth his master! Farewell, finally, to annoyance without anger, delay without vexation, indolence without ennui, endurance without fatigue, appetite without intemperance, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... series 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' was at first only ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... far too clever for that; and 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 ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... It was one of the standing amusements of these worthies, who had gotten to be sworn friends and constant associates, after they had caught as many fish as they wished, to retire to the favourite spring, light, the one his cigar, the other his pipe, mix their grog, and then relieve their ennui, when tired of discussing men and things, by playing cards on a particular stump. Now, it happens that the captain had the identical pack which had been used on all such occasions in his pocket, as was evident in the fact that the ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... of mind to be always like that of our pilgrim fathers in times of Indian massacres. When they went after the cows or to hoe the corn, they took their guns with them, and turned no corner without a sharp lookout against ambush. No doubt such a condition of affairs has this advantage, that it makes ennui impossible. There is always something to live for, if it be only ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... to Hen, Jessie," Mr. Sherwood said decisively. "But a lumber camp is no place for you. Let's see, his mail address is Hobart Forks, isn't it? Right in the heart of the woods. If you weren't eaten up by black gnats, you would be by ennui," ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... he found one lone, bobtailed street-car waiting at the end of its line, its horse dejected with the ennui of its career, the driver ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... my being beautiful. I was not vain, but as conscious of my beauty as I was of that of a flower, and sometimes it intoxicated me. For, in spite of the comforting novels of the Jane Eyre school, it is hardly possible to set an undue value upon beauty; it defies ennui. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... to the issue of the trial in all the neighbouring coffee-houses. Ennui, impatience, disgust sat on almost every countenance. The figures passing and repassing, rendered more ghastly by the pallid lights, and who in a slow, sepulchral voice pronounced only the word—Death; others calculating if they should have time to go to dinner before they gave their verdict; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... solitude, ennui, and consciousness of his impotence and insignificance—particularly acute by contrast with the sphere of power in which he had so lately moved—and after several marches with the marshal's baggage and the French army, which occupied the whole district, Balashev was ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... cause of Juno's untimely end. For had we, instead of kneeling (which by the way seemed to "punish" you a good deal), had we, I say, vested the property in one or other of us, she, instead of diverting her ennui by hunting, would have been trotting home by the side of her master—and the article ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... enfance, f., childhood, enfant, m. f., child. enfanter, to beget. enfer, m., enfers, pl., hell. enfin, at length, at last, lastly, in short, anyhow. enflammer, to inflame. enfoncer, to drive deeply. ennemi, m., enemy; adj., hostile. ennui, m., weariness, trouble, ennuyer, to weary; s'— , to find no pleasure in. entasser, to heap up. entendre, to hear; se faire —, to be heard; to understand; faire —, to give to understand. enti-er, -re, whole. entraner, to sweep on, away. entre, between, among, in, above. entre, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... on the day when he acquainted me with these plans, that I really believed him insane. Nevertheless, I replied that I would obey him, and to tell the truth, I was not ill pleased at the thought of the change. My life with M. de Chalusse was a monotonous and cheerless one. I was almost dying of ennui, for I had been accustomed to work, bustle, and confusion with the Greloux, and I felt delighted at the prospect of finding myself among companions ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... 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, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... understand that a "voyage" means "out" and "home," or "thence" and "back again," while a "passage" means from place to place—but our passage was pregnant with no events worth recording. We had the usual amount of good and bad weather, the usual amount of eating and drinking, and the usual amount of ennui. The latter circumstance, perhaps, contributed to the digesting of a further scheme of my uncle's, which it ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... educating their own children, are employed some hours 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 ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... frame, to which fatigue seems a stranger. A cheerful disposition that finds amusement in the passing trifle, and powers of concentration that entirely abstract him from his surroundings, keep him free from "ennui" that is not the least disagreeable feature of life in this wilderness. And he possesses a very important adjunct, though to the uninitiated it may seem trifling, a stomach that can relish and digest fat. The habit of command ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Ennui, in situations like the present, being isolated and shut up as it were from the world, requires to be guarded against. The surest preventive of it is employment, and diversity in employment. It has been determined to-day to get up a periodical ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... a remedy against ennui and the troubles of life. The wretchedness I endure is not to be measured; I am entitled ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... her teeth in impotent rage. In common with many other young girls of her time, she had never 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
... a state of perfect rest, but it was not the remedies or the abstinence I dreaded most; I feared the effects of ennui; I thought I should die of it. No doubt the doctor saw the danger as well as myself, for he asked me if I would mind his sister coming and working in my room occasionally with a few of her friends. I replied that, despite my shame of shewing myself to young ladies ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... tall gentleman, cheerfully, though somewhat with ennui, enduring his nineteenth winter. His long and slender face he wore smiling, beneath an accurately cut plaster of dark hair cornicing his forehead, a fashion followed by many youths of that year. This perfect bang was shown ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... His sense 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 in it; she had launched one member of the ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... Piedmont to take possession of Rome Does not think that Naples will submit to Piedmont Wishes of Naples only negative Ampere's reading Execution of three generations Familiarity with death in 1793 Sanson Public executioners The 'Chambre noire' Violation of correspondence Toleration of Ennui Prisoners of State M. and Madame de La Fayette Mirabeau and La Fayette Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette Evils of Democratic despotism Ignorance and indolence of 'La jeune France' Algeria a God-send Family life ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... touch of fire, and it would have been sheer devilry. As it was he could have been sorry for her, though in her infinite apathy she seemed to be placed beyond his pity and her own. With no movement save in her delicate sallow fingers, she sat there like an incarnate Ennui, the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... head, sketched in the streets of Algiers. See the feline characteristics, the pointed, drooping moustache and chin-tuft, the extreme retrocession of the nostrils, the thin, weak and cruel mouth, the retreating forehead, the filmed eye, the ennui, the terrestrial detachment, of the Arab. He is a dandy, a creature of alternate flash and dejection, a wearer of ornaments, a man proud of his striped hood and ornamental agraffes. The Kabyle, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... sitting on a chair of crimson velvet; a cushion of the same costly material supported his feet; and he was looking with an appearance of apathy and ennui on the splendid group around him. The glitter of the lights, the lustre of the jewels, and the graceful waving of the many-colored plumes, gave every thing a courtly, sumptuous appearance, and the air was heavy with odors, the fragrant offering of many a costly exotic. Suddenly every ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... puts him on his metal. He has a new responsibility and it adds to his strength of character to assume it in all its phases. Another thing it brings comfort and joy to the mother during the long days while her man is out in the fray. It drives ennui out of the household throughout our ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... with singular intensity, for the safety of the daring young lovers, that unknown youth whose feet had foreworn the path for his feet and that dead and gone young girl, who had dared anything rather than endure the mortal ennui of those hours behind ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... believed in it here. For how I should be tormented! The pious would crowd about me, saying, 'Were we not right? Did we not predict it? Has it not turned out exactly so?' And thus even up yonder there would be everlasting ennui." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... during the next moment or two one would feel inclined 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 touched upon. For every man HAS his hobby. One man's may be ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... did not fail to read it in D'Entremont's eyes. Here was a young woman who had read. She could admire Corinne, which was much in vogue in those days among English-speaking students of French; she could oppose Saint Simon. The Marquis d'Entremont had resigned himself to the ennui of talking to Swiss farmers about their vineyards, of listening to Swiss grandmothers telling stories of their childhood in Neufchatel and Vaud. But to find in this young village school-teacher one who could speak, and ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... understand her, prompted the first letter; which, according to M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, was dictated by her to Anna's governess, Mlle. Henriette Borel. So she started lightly on the road which was to lead her, the leisured and elegant great lady suffering only from ennui, to the period of her life during which she would toil hour after hour at writing, would be overwhelmed by business, pestered by duns and creditors, overworked, overburdened, and over-worried. She was certainly not very ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... presence 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)
... of mere material well being, have been too long in the habit of regarding poetry and the arts as mere recreations, to be taken up at spare moments, pursued when we have nothing better to do; as a relief for the ennui of idleness, or an ornament for the centre table; without remembering how many good and great men have given up their whole lives to its advancement; without considering into how many hearts it has borne its soothing lessons ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had been gravely attentive. The faces of the others wore not even the tribute of pretended ennui. They had betrayed an elaborate deafness. They now affected to believe that Sandy Sawtelle had not related an anecdote. They spoke casually and with an effect of polished ease while yet here capitulated, as ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... that followed, these rides became frequent, and despite the fact that they seldom spoke, they unconsciously grew into a closeness of companionship which saved her from the ennui of unwonted domestic environment. The intense vitality of the young foreman attracted her, and she began to have a friendly sympathy for him, and even to feel a tranquil satisfaction in his reposeful silence. At times she was ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... or the brain soothed by monotony of gentle repetition, and when the body is placed at rest, and the viscera are normal and give rise to no disturbing sensations, consciousness is then suspended, and natural sleep ensues. Either local fatigue of the muscles, or of the heart, or ennui, or exhaustion of some brain center usually leads us to seek those conditions in which sleep comes. The whole organism may sleep for the sake of the part. To avoid sleeplessness, we seek monotony of stimulus, either objective or subjective. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... identity of type does not mean imitation—it means that the writers were all in the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages, and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw, in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven and humanity. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... parents, and yet was ashamed on account of my origin to be called by my name. Happily for me, she was fond of visiting and amusements. Otherwise, to escape from her, I might have become a gambler, or worse; but, to avoid meeting her, I remained at home—for there she seldom was. At first from ennui, but afterward from real delight in the occupation, I gave myself up to study. Reading formed my mind and heart. I became a changed being. Some months ago my father died, my sister went to Lithuania, whilst my mother, in her old ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... 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, is ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... into Woodstock, which they found to be like all Oxford towns, only rather duller perhaps, the principal signs of life being some fowls lazily pecking about in the grass-grown street, and two cats sporting without fear of interruption from a dog, who was too much overcome by the ennui of the place to interfere ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... struggled with his passion, Barbarina had a far more dangerous enemy to contend with. Sentimentality is veiled in melancholy, in softened light and faded tints; but ennui has no eye, nor mind, nor heart for any thing. It is a fearful enemy! Barbarina was weary, oh, so weary! Was it perhaps impatience to appear again upon the stage which made the hours so leaden, so long drawn out? ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... state of profound idleness, which to me is a luxury; and we should all, I believe, have been in a state of high enjoyment, had it not been for the detestable cold gales and much rain, which always gives much ennui to children away from their homes. I received your letter of 13th June, when working like a slave with Mr. Sowerby at drawing for my second volume, and so put off answering it till when I knew I should be at leisure. I was extremely ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... wandering having long familiarized me to situations of every kind, so much so as to feel myself quite as comfortable in a prison as in the gilded chamber of palaces; indeed more so, as in the former place I can always add to my store of useful information, whereas in the latter, ennui frequently assails me. I had, moreover, been thinking for some time past of paying a visit to the prison, partly in the hope of being able to say a few words of Christian instruction to the criminals, and partly with the view of making certain investigations in the robber language of Spain, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... think it is so. Yet you know me so well, Don, that you should understand me better. I handed the whole affair over to Nevin, and to you that seems like ennui, I know. But it does not mean that; it simply means that as a hopeless man of business I appoint another to do what I know myself incapable of doing. Once I am committed to the production of a book, Don, I cease to exist ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... sat at the large bow window of the D——- Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs—the [Greek phrase]—and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... humble, odd-looking box by my lady's maid; the cushions piled in the carriage to make a soft seat still softer, and to prevent the dreaded possibility of a jolt; the smelling-bottles, the cordials, the baskets of biscuit and fruit; the new publications; all provided to guard against hunger, fatigue, or ennui; the led horses to vary the mode of travelling; and all this preparation and parade to move, perhaps, some very good-for-nothing personage about a ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisons are gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life are combined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisons for admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; though at the same time in another column, you may find the statement that, in view of modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impossible ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and cloth jackets trimmed with jet, were already thronging at the door of the traktir. Policemen, with yellow cords to their uniforms and carrying pistols, were on duty, looking out for some disorder which might distract the ennui that oppressed them. On the paths of the boulevards and on the newly-revived grass, children and dogs ran about, playing, and the nurses sat merrily chattering on the benches. Along the streets, still fresh and damp on ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... and for 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.' Her existence had become a hateful waste—a garden, she ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... better marry a respectable pork-butcher outright, and have at least the healthful exercise of chopping sausage-meat to fill up the stray gaps in the conversation. In that condition of life, they say, people are at any rate perfectly safe from the terrors of ennui. However, the season was over at last, thank Heaven; and in a week or so more they would be at dear old ugly Dunbude again for the whole winter. There Hilda would go sketching once more on the moorland, and if this time she didn't make that ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... but found that it numbed his arms, and that the sea air made him sleepy. Motor-cars agreed with him only when driving with a pretty woman. Forced through ennui to fish off the rocks, he soon tired of the sea-perch and rock-cod and the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... were, therefore, forced to sit by the fire of the stove in the dining-room, talking over their former business, trying to recall the faces of their customers and other matters they had intended to forget. By the end of the second winter ennui weighed heavily on them. They did not know how to get through each day; sometimes as they went to bed the words escaped them, "There's another over!" They dragged out the morning by staying in bed, and dressing slowly. Rogron shaved himself every day, examined his face, consulted his sister ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for the great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible in the work of his hands. This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at an impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seems strained and marred in the effort, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... wrote to you the last lugubrious sheet, I have not had time to write you further. When I say that I had not time, that as usual means, that the three demons, indolence, business, and ennui, have so completely shared my hours among them, as not to leave me a five minutes' fragment to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... that rises and is gone, Let your own Spirit lift from Dawn to Dawn And so bestartle Ennui that at last Even the Grave will ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... because they have been previously given together, not because we perceive the agreement of resemblance between them, but because they have a common emotional note. Joy, sorrow, love, hatred, admiration, ennui, pride, fatigue, etc., may become a center of attraction that groups images or events having otherwise no rational relations between them, but having the same emotional stamp,—joyous, melancholy, erotic, etc. This form of association is ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... every-day life had so many adventures, I do not understand how any one can complain of ennui. Through what varied ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... for sculpture, mathematics, classical and modern literature, physical science as then comprehended, and all the bodily exercises proper to the estate of a young nobleman, were at his command. His biographer asserts that he was never idle, never subject to ennui or fatigue. He used to say that books at times gave him the same pleasure as brilliant jewels or perfumed flowers: hunger and sleep could not keep him from them then. At other times the letters on the page appeared to him like twining and contorted scorpions, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... or of 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 ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... upturning face of each piece of a newly dealt hand, when the clock struck off that hour. But if Hogarty was oblivious to everything but the game, his opponent was far from being in that much to be envied state. Bobby Ogden yawned—yawned from sheer ennui—although he tried to hide that indication of his boredom behind a perfectly manicured hand, while ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... shut, and curtains only are hung in the doorways, so that this little wild one was in and out and everywhere just as it hit her fancy. She had never been taught even to know her letters; she had never been kept to any task; she was a complete slave of idleness, restlessness, and ennui. 'It is time for Louisa to go to England,' was quietly remarked by the parents; and no one present controverted ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... anything but newspapers and sporting magazines; and when he sees me occupied with a book, he won't let me rest till I close it. In fine weather he generally manages to get through the time pretty well, but on rainy days, of which we have had a good many of late, it is quite painful to witness his ennui. I do all I can to amuse him, but it is impossible to get him to feel interested in what I most like to talk about, while, on the other hand, he likes to talk about things that cannot interest me—or even that annoy me—and these please him—the most of ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... short, there was neither judicial nor executive arm of the law in action. One may, therefore, realize the hindrances which Dan Anderson met in getting up his lawsuit. Yet he went forward in the attempt patiently, driven simply by ennui. He did not dream that he was doing ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... 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 her off to ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... naught; indeede one is too manie for him that cannot use it well. Mithridates was reported to have learned three and twentie severall languages, and Ennius to have three harts, because three tongues, but it should seeme thou hast not one sound heart, but such a one as is cancred with ennui; nor anie tongue, but a forked tongue, thou hissest so like a snake, and yet me thinkes by thy looke, thou shouldst have no tongue thou gapest and mowest so like a frogg: I, but thou canst reade whatsoever is good in Italian, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... a lady's boudoir in 1837,—an exhibition of the contents of many shops, which amuse the eye, as if ennui were the one thing to be dreaded by the social world of the liveliest and most stirring capital in Europe. Why is there nothing of an inner life? nothing which leads to revery, nothing reposeful? Why indeed? Because no one in our day is sure of the future; we are living ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... persons, save and except those with whom unsavoury intrigues might or would be possible,—sneering and salacious in conversation, bitter and carping of criticism, generally blase, and suffering from the incurable ennui of utter selfishness,—the men concentrating their thoughts chiefly on racing, gaining, and Other Men's Wives,—the women dividing all their stock of emotions between Bridge, Dress, and Other Women's Husbands. And when Julian Adderley, as an author in embryo, found himself ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... distant past of other civilised nations; they make their poets tell them of the heroes of Greece and Rome, and immense metrical works are devoted to these personages, which will beguile the time and drive ennui away from castle-halls. These poems form a whole cycle; Alexander is the centre of it, as Charlemagne is of the cycle of France, and Arthur of the cycle ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... and if many obtrude themselves at once, I write you, as at present, of—nothing. Indeed, my dear Theodosia, I have many, many moments of solicitude about you. Remember that occupation will infallibly expel the fiend ennui, and that solitude is the bug-bear of fools. God bless and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the same time the period ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... dismal and enormous Mansions of Silence which society has raised to Ennui in that Omphalos of town, Pall Mall, and which, because they knock you down with their dulness, are called Clubs no doubt; those who yawn from a bay-window in St. James's Street, at a half-score of other ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... monotony of hospital life. If you are sick at home, you are glad to have your neighbor step in and bring the healthy bracing air of out-door life into the dimness and languor of your invalid existence. Much more does the sick soldier like it,—for ennui, far more than pain, is his great burden. When I was at Washington, I accepted with great satisfaction an invitation to go with a Sanitary visitor on her round of duty. When we came to the hospital, I asked the ward-master if he would like to have me distribute ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the mayor putting on their already heavy-ruffled garments the sacred ruffle of law or religion; the babe brought to church by his mother and kindred to have the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... desk, watching the confusion with an amusement which had banished every trace of ennui, felt his arm touched. He turned and recognised the be-gilt messenger of ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... in that first conversation, told me much about herself that she did not know she was telling. I became fairly certain, for instance, that she had not married Mr. Douglas van Tuiver for love. The young girl who has so married does not suffer from ennui in the first year, nor does she find her happiness depending upon her ability to solve the problem of charity in connection ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... no means sure that what man wants is peace and quiet and tranquillity. That is too close to ennui, which is his greatest dread. What man wants is not peace but a battle. He must pit his force against someone or something. Every language is most rich in synonyms for battle, war, contest, conflict, quarrel, combat, fight. German children play all day long ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... younger than he did when I last saw him. You really ought to take up your abode here, or live somewhere near him. He mopes dreadfully, and needs nothing so much as the society of an old friend. You could rouse him from his blue fits and ennui, and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... occasioned was for the strangers alone. All the movable property of the citizens was safe in the interior: and they were all safe in person. The dismay was for the French, when they found only a burning soil, tumbling roofs, and tottering walls, where they had expected repose and feasting after the ennui of a voyage across the Atlantic. For the court ladies, there existed at present only the alternative of remaining on board the ships, of which they were heartily weary, and establishing themselves on the barren island ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... nature had broken down the pride which caused me to conceal my true self from the daylit world. I sold the home and cursed its dank old trees and toadstools and silent, gloomy chambers the day I signed the deed. I went to city after city, leaving each as it threatened me with ennui or with retribution. Money went scattering hither and thither, spent madly, given, stolen, borrowed, with no regret but that the piper might some day, when the pay was no longer forthcoming, ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... miracles, had built himself even under that tumultuous roof. Strollers in the halls or along the breezy verandas often paused to listen to the music of instrument or voice which came floating out from these sequestered rooms. Frequent laughter and the murmur of conversation proved that ennui was unknown, and a touch of romance inevitably enhanced the interest wakened by the beautiful young pair, always together, always happy, never weary of the dolce far niente of this ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... then there are betrayals of that predominant French weakness, which the French will persist in cherishing as a virtue,—the love of glory. M. Sainte-Beuve thinks Buffon's passion for glory saved him in his latter years from ennui, from "that languor of the soul which follows the age of the passions." Where are to be found men more the victims of disgust with life than that eminent pair, not more distinguished for literary brilliancy and contemporaneous success than ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... rheumatic pains. What then? 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 them. There are in fact two ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... over with vegetation. To puzzle myself in such a labyrinth there was no temptation, so taking advantage of the lateness of the hour, and muttering a few complimentary promises of returning at the first opportunity, I escaped the ennui of this endless scrubbery, and got home, with the determination of being wiser and less curious if ever my stars should bring me again to the Hague. To-morrow I bid it adieu, and if the horses but second my endeavours, shall be delivered in a few days from ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... 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 Nature is artificialized. At certain seasons, numbers ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... 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, and redoubled horror, when the ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... 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
... There is a peculiar dulness and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six weeks spent en province, however, I saw few places that had not ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... at the news, without breaking the wax, has been successfully solved; it has the same thirst for scandal, the same intense interest for the most contemptible trivialities, the same constantly impending danger of suicide from ennui, did not human nature adapt itself to its environments, and sink into pettiness as naturally as though there were no such things as towns and cities, and enlarged views of man and nature in the world: all these it has the same as any British ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... last forty years they have seen the world; but since 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 more offensive than ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... domestic and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures, and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed destined to live. He sees the impulses under which men and women seek to escape "from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive motives of low-grade ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
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