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“Philosophy is not one truth, but thousands of truths. You don’t have to believe in just one thing. When you choose one idea, you close yourself to the rest.”
Marcel Wanders, Dutch industrial designer, Jane Szita, “A Life in Design,” Dwell (April 2006), 23.
“I’ve been hanging around this magnificent setting for 30 minutes and I haven’t had one moment of elevated consciousness. … I look at my watch and realize I had better start feeling a serene oneness with God’s creation pretty soon. I’ve got dinner reservations in Missoula at six.”
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 218-19.
“I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“For I have known them all [time, hours, opportunities] already, known them all -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“A callus is a form of the body’s self-defense against too much stimulation – a thickening and hardening of the normally sensitive skin. Boredom could be the psychological manifestation of an inner defense mechanism.”
Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 37.
“Hell is an endless holiday – the everlasting state of having nothing to do and plenty of money to spend on doing it.”
Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 36, citing Orrin Edgar Klapp, Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 40.
“The Waterman, however, is not negotiable. I must have something thrilling with which to record my boredom.”
Quoting an advertisement for the Waterman Pen Company; Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 47, citing Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: UCP, 1995), 249.
“You ask me whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as all that. But if one is only to talk from firsthand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sapho, of Euripides of Catullus of Shakespeare of Spenser of Austen of Bronte of – anyone else I have read.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 146; writing to friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 12 October, 1915.
“I lay on my bed full of stale liquor and despair; alone in the house, and, as it seemed, utterly alone, not just in Lourenço Marques, in Africa, in the world. Alone in the universe, in eternity. With no glimmer of light in the prevailing blackness; no human voice I could hope to hear, or human heart I could hope to reach; no God to whom I could turn, or Saviour to take my hand.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time; Quoted by Os Guinness, Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life (Colorado Springs, CO: Water Books, 2001), 23-4.
“Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky, all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.”
Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (New York: Broadway, 2003), 194.
