SO GOOD QUOTES

Distraction is the corollary of instability.  No doubt you remember how Saint Thomas showed that acedia provoked a twofold movement: first a movement of flight from what causes the sadness or disgust; then a second movement of active seeking: the search for compensations, distractions.  Every man can be subject to the test of time and, therefore, to the trail of boredom; boredom that is not only a passing, external phenomenon but in the end reveals a profound incapacity of the will.  That is when someone may choose to be distracted, to “amuse oneself”, by seeking compensations or else by falling into activism.

One seeks, not fullness, but rather the accumulation of images as an evasion.  Travel agencies proliferate.  No one thinks of anything but getting away, but wherever he goes, he takes himself along.  Now if emptiness, anxiety, boredom dwell within a being, this emptiness, anxiety, and boredom will follow him to the ends of the earth.  The tenacious illusion of always being better off elsewhere does not abandon the individual.  Anything seems preferable to self-awareness and diffuse pain.
—Isabelle Prêtre, La tentation du désespoir

The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault