Whenever we are not involved in one or other of these things but directed back to existence itself we are overtaken by its worthlessness and vanity and this is the sensation called boredom.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Category: VOCATION
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They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, ‘Thus each man ever flees himself.’ But to what end, if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. We are weak in enduring anything, and cannot put up with toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything for long. This weakness has driven some men to their deaths; because by frequently changing their aims they kept falling back on the same things and had left themselves no room for novelty. They began to be sick of life and the world itself, and out of their enervating self-indulgence arose the feeling ‘How long must I face the same things?’
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It -
All these afflictions are worse when, through hatred of their toilsome failure, men have retreated into idleness and private studies which are unbearable to a mind aspiring to public service, keen on activity, and restless by nature because of course it is short of inner resources. In consequence, when the pleasures have been removed which busy people derive from their actual activities, the mind cannot endure the house, the solitude, the walls, and hates to observe its own isolation. From this arises that boredom and self-dissatisfaction, that turmoil of a restless mind and gloomy and grudging endurance of our leisure, especially when we are ashamed to admit the reasons for it and our sense of shame drives the agony inward, and our desires are trapped in narrow bounds without escape and stifle themselves. From this arise melancholy and mourning and a thousand vacillations of a wavering mind, buoyed up by the birth of hope and sickened by the death of it. From this arises the state of mind of those who loathe their own leisure and complain that they have nothing to do, and the bitterest envy at the promotion of others. For unproductive idleness nurtures malice, and because they themselves could not prosper they want everyone else to be ruined. Then from this dislike of others’ success and despair of their own, their minds become enraged against fortune, complain about the times, retreat into obscurity, and brood over their own sufferings until they become sick and tired of themselves.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
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They are all in the same category, both those who are afflicted with fickleness, boredom and a ceaseless change of purpose, and who always yearn for what they have left behind, and those who just yawn from apathy. There are those too who toss around like insomniacs, and keep changing their position until they find rest through sheer weariness. They keep altering the condition of their lives, and eventually stick to that one in which they are trapped not by weariness with further change but by old age which is too sluggish for novelty. There are those too who suffer not from moral steadfastness but from inertia, and so lack the fickleness to live as they wish, and just live as they have begun. In fact there are innumerable characteristics of the malady, but one effect–dissatisfaction with oneself. This arises from mental instability and from fearful and unfulfilled desires, when men do not dare or do not achieve all they long for, and all they grasp at is hope: they are always unbalanced and fickle, an inevitable consequence of living in suspense.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
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“Men with little natural talent should not despair of themselves and become indolent as regards the God-loving and virtuous life, and despise it as unattainable, beyond their reach. Instead, they should exercise their capacity and take care of themselves. For even if they are unable to attain the limit with respect to virtue and salvation, through practice and aspiration they will become better or at least not become worse – which is no small profit for the soul.”
—St. Anthony the Great
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“When you’re doing something out of obligation, it costs you energy. When you’re doing something out of intention, it gives you energy.”
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One never accepts any vocational responsibility. If one does so, one simply becomes Mr Anybody, a tiny little pivot in the machinery of the corporate state; you cease to direct your own affairs, and then theories can be of little help. One acquires a title, and in it is contained all the consistency of sin and evil. The law one is then in thrall to is equally boring, whether promotion is rapid or slow. A title is something one can never be rid of again, it would have to be lost through some crime which incurs a public whipping, and even then you are not certain, for you may be pardoned and have your title restored to you by royal decree. Though one abstains from vocational responsibility, one should not be inactive but stress all occupation that is identical with idleness; one must engage in all kinds of breadless skills. Yet in this connection one should develop oneself not so much extensively as intensively, and in spite of being on in years, prove the truth of the old proverb that it takes little to please a child.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others. The people who do not bore themselves are generally those who are busy in the world in one way or another, but that is just why they are the most boring, the most insufferable, of all.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
We pass one another in the street, the one person looks like the other, and the other just like anyone else, and only the experienced observer suspects that, in that head, there lives a lodger who has nothing to do with the world, but lives out his lonely life confined to quiet domesticity.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard
SO GOOD QUOTES 