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More "Ennui" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ludwig followed hotly, hoping to engage separate columns of the huge army, but it was too late, and after a futile pursuit round the entire country, he had the chagrin of seeing the French enter Stuttgart. Here Villars remained but a few days. Wilhelmine said afterwards that 'l'ennui de Stuttgard' had proved a greater defence than the entire Imperial army! Be this as it may, Villars evacuated Stuttgart in an amazingly short time, and retired eastwards to the ancient town of Schorndorf. Now the Duchess-mother emerged from her dower-house at Stetten, and craved a meeting ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... decent to leave off his business; accordingly he generously gave up his shop and his stock to his head man, set up his coach, and resolved to live like a gentleman; but, in less than a month, the man, used to business, found, that living like a gentleman was dying of ennui; upon which he bought his shop and stock, resumed his trade, and lived very happily, after he ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... as prisoners to Paris, Caged us in Vincennes' strong fortress. 'Damn them!' said our valiant colonel, Hans von Weerth, 'it was much nicer, Galloping, with shining sabres Hostile lines to charge with fury, Than on this hard bench to sit here, And to battle with ennui thus. For this foe there is no weapon, Neither wine nor even dice-box, Nothing but tobacco. I once Tried it in the country of the Dull Mynheers, and here it also Will do service; let us smoke then!' The commander of the fortress Got a keg of best Varinas For us from a Dutch retailer, ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... 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 ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... a 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 ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... 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 ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... life is almost 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 this ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... 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 of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... at this pleasant place of endurable ennui for three long months, during which there was no going out from nine to five P.M. Our society afforded little resource, our reading less. When the weather permitted—that is, in the delicious, incomparable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... in dock were not, however, allowed to pass altogether unpleasantly or devoid of interest, for the officers—no whit better off than we in the matter of leave—recognising the necessity of making an effort to divert ennui, and to set an example of cheerfulness under depressing circumstances, got up a series of athletic sports on the limited space afforded by the dock. It will suffice to notice a few of the leading items in our highly amusing programme, for amusing it really was from beginning to end, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... 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 Dame Dods in the mysteries of curry and mullegatawny—drilled the chambermaid ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... he 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
... 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 desire ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... next day, as it once did. 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 visions, ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... ten years 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 give him ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... he entered the hotel and mounted to his room. He was beginning to hate it, its hideous hotel furniture, the memory of hours of ennui spent there. Against his doorsill the evening paper lay, and picking it up he let himself in and lighted the gas. On the mantel the small nickel clock seemed to start out at him, insolently proclaiming the hour, half past seven. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... might there not be somebody else? At the same time there was nothing absurd in the idea that a youth, fresh from college and suddenly discompanioned at home, without society, possessed by no love of literature, and with almost no amusements, should, if only for very ennui, be attracted by the pretty face and figure of Eppy, and then enthralled by her coquetries of instinctive response. There was danger to the girl both in silence and in speech: if there was no ground for the apprehension, the very supposition was an injury—might ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... husband's example but saw no reason why she need 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
... widow. 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 cards were nearly ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... powerful 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
... had again proved to them that it was vain for them to attempt to stand. A long pause followed at Pretoria, broken by occasional small alarms and excursions, which served no end save to keep the army from ennui. In spite of occasional breaks in his line of communications, horses and supplies were coming up rapidly, and, by the middle of July, Roberts was ready for the field again. At the same time Hunter had come up from Potchefstroom, and Hamilton ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be doing violence to my feelings,—submitting my will always to that of my superiors, never contentious, never sulky, finishing every work begun, in spite of dislike or ennui. ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... necessary variations arising from our environment. There is not a spinning-mill in it all. How would some of us like that? There is not a ledger, nor a theatre, no novels, no amusements. Would it not be intolerable ennui to be put down in such an order of things? You would be like the Israelites, loathing 'this light bread' and hungering for the strong-smelling and savoury-tasting leeks and garlic, even if in order to taste them you ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to most things and most 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 ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... over alternate swells and depressions and finally to reach the vast, interminable low prairie that extends itself in front—(be it for hours, days or weeks)—one never tires; pleasurable and exhilarating sensations are all the time felt; ennui is never experienced. Doubtless there are moments when excessive heat, a want of fresh water, and other privations remind one that life is a toil; but these drawbacks are of short duration. There are no concealed dangers—no difficulties of road; a far-spreading verdure, relieved by a profusion ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... deceived as our own conscience"; or from Pascal: "Habit is a second nature which destroys the original one." Nietzsche says: "Many do not find their heart until they have lost their head"; Voltaire: "The secret of ennui is to have said everything"; Jean Paul: "Sorrows are like the clouds in a thunderstorm; they look black in the distance, but over us hardly gray." Once more I quote Nietzsche: "The same emotions are different in their rhythm for man and woman: therefore men and women ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... a man who absorbs you, he uses up the vital fluid of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be amused by those who call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no one ever comes: none visit us but those whose intentions are evidently dishonorable for him, and who endeavor, unsuccessfully, ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... strange, fish-like mouths and eyes. Their habits were as unpollywoglike as their appearance. I visited their micaceous pool again and again; and if I could have spent days instead of hours with them, no moment of ennui would have intervened. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... excitement and salt. Given a people of strong political proclivities suddenly turned soldier; given human grudges and likings, admirations and contempts; given the ballot in military as in civil life; given a chance to inject champagne into the ennui of camp existence, and in lieu of gun practice to send off sky-rockets and catherine wheels; given a warm personal interest in each private's bosom as to whom, for the next twelfth month (if the war lasted that long), he was going to obey—and there resulted a shattering of monotony ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... of Versailles would occasionally shed a ray of sunshine, or rather lamp light, over Louis the Fifteenth's habitual ennui. After supper, chansons, sallies, and repartee, would be the order of the night. Occasionally at these supper-parties some brilliant things would be said. One evening, when some one sang a complaint upon the misfortunes of our first ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... sure, wish to do that; is it not so? 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 dust and weariness. I have had, of ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... establishment, was to make this feast possible. My visit took place early in March, so that I did not see the celebration; but from what I have heard, the little colony does what it can to make up for a year of ennui. Every twenty-five years it celebrates a jubilee; the second came ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence not only defied danger (that were little to a woman of her temper), but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continued self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now, if Shakespere had drawn the character of the Duchess de Longueville, he would have shown us the same ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... 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. What was it all worth, this wilderness of men and women as monotonous ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... The ennui of unused powers and corroding heart-hunger had made the Princess old before her time. Scheffer's fight with adversity had long before robbed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... then, Siberian anthology! Go! Thou wilt make many a coxcomb happy, wilt be placed by him on the toilet-table of his sweetheart, and in reward wilt obtain her alabaster, lily-white hand for his tender kiss. Go! thou wilt fill up many a weary gulf of ennui in assemblies and city-visits, and may be relieve a Circassienne, who has confessed herself weary amidst a shower of calumnies. Go! thou wilt be consulted in the kitchens of many critics; they will fly thy light, and like the screech-owl, retreat into thy shadow. Ho, ho, ho! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that 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
... well-educated character, saves from idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, those tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations of humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man, and which are potent in her, for evil or for good, in proportion as they are left to ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... 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
... that 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 in ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... 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 killed every ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... young men's minds, at that late day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which [141] had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined with appetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort of suicide (instances of the like have been seen since) by which a great metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysical ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... against his will, to return to his father's country house. Dirty, poor, and miserable did the paternal nest seem to him. The solitude and the dullness of a retired country life offended him at every step. He was devoured by ennui; besides, every one in the house, except his mother, regarded him with unloving eyes. His father disliked his metropolitan habits, his dress-coats and shirt-frills, his books, his flute, his cleanliness—from which he justly argued that his son regarded him with a feeling of aversion. He was always ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... After supper, cards; and after cards, bed; to rise 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 next morning. In America, on the other hand, the society ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... individual who arrived last being universally regarded as the winner. The members of the orchestra were filing negligently in from the back of the vast terraced platform, yawning, and ravaged by the fearful ennui of eternal high-class music. They entered in dozens and scores, and they kept on entering, and as they gazed inimically at each other, fingering their instruments, their pale faces seemed to be asking: "Why should it be necessary to ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Midi some of those troubadours whose romantic airs and graceful verses were so appreciated in the little courts of the south of France and, later, in the gloomy castles of the nobles of the north. Great was the prevalence of ennui in these fortresses, in which there was but little sunshine and a great dearth of all other refining and civilizing influences. It was impossible to be engaged in warfare or the chase all the time, and the wandering pilgrim, with ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch—a beetle—her soul fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and consider and calculate! Enough, enough—there was an end to man's capacity for complications, even. Or ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... you will of the glory of poverty, and of the ennui of pleasure, there is no life like this life, wherein to the sight and the sense all things minister; wherefrom harsh discord and all unloveliness are banished: where the rare beauty of high-born women is common; where the passions at their ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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
... duty,—old-fashioned words, but serenity of spirit is their meaning. Suddenly to come face to face with one's self, to strip away the self-imposed disguise, to see clearly that jealousy, impatience, luxurious, and never satisfied tastes, a selfish and restless spirit, are back of ennui and fatigue, pains and aches of body and mind, is to step into ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Russian. These are not afflicted with curiosity as to each other's past. The chief is under sealed orders; both German and Russian had left their respective countries for good of Kaiser and Tsar; the American is an adventurous son of millionaire residing in New York. Weary of ennui in the metropolis, this Yankee aristocrat seeks diversion in trips to all parts of the globe. All of these are ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... 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 ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... trying to cure a sick man we must discover the seat of his disease. Do you know it in this case? No? Then I will tell you what ails the king. He has an internal complaint and a wound. The former is called ennui, and the latter is in his heart. The Athenian is a good remedy for the first, but for the second I know of none; such wounds either scar over of themselves, or the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for, if he did, the saints would flock around him on all sides, exclaiming, Were we not in the right? Did we not tell you so? Has it not all turned out just as we said? And, with such a conceited clatter in his ears, he thought that, before the end of six months, he might die of ennui in ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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
... more than mine, Where flowers for perfect stanzas shine— Flowers that a child may pluck in play, No harsh voice frightening it away. And I'm alone—all pleasure o'er— Alone with pedant called "Ennui," For since the morning at my door Ennui has waited patiently. That docto-r-London born, you mark, One Sunday in December dark, Poor little ones—he loved you not, And waited till the chance he got To enter as ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... thought, "I see and yet what I look at remains invisible. But tonight outlines dance. The night is a maniac suffering from ennui. His dark eyes are weary with the emptiness they create. Vainly he searches for life, his eyes devouring it, and leaving only his own image for him ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... kind offer 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 ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... Heart's Desire! In 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 ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... no commission. Impatience and ennui had fairly mastered me. The time hung heavily ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... 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
... sick and tired of the one single topic of conversation. We are like the people at Cremorne waiting for the fireworks to begin; and I really do believe that if this continues much longer, the most cowardly will welcome the bombs as a relief from the oppressive ennui. Few regiments are seen now during the day marching through the streets—they are most of them either on the ramparts or outside them. From 8 to 9 in the morning there is a military movement, as regiments come and go, on and off duty. In the courtyard ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... faces awaken from 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 ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... or a vixen, sometimes the treasure and delight of an Englishman; the enlivener of his fireside, and his safeguard from ennui, is a phenomenon utterly unknown in Dahomy—that noble spirit, which animates the happier dames in lands of liberty, being ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... 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 ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... so readily to her suggestion that to him seemed an easy task. The habits of years, however, are not so easily broken, and by the time Saratoga was reached, Richard's patience began to give way beneath Ethelyn's multifarious exactions and the ennui consequent upon his traveling about so long. Still he did pretty well for him, growing very red in the face with his efforts to draw on gloves a size too small, and feeling excessively hot and uncomfortable ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... nevertheless increased, when the system is stimulated into rather stronger action than usual, as after a copious dinner, and at the beginning of intoxication; and diminished, when it is only excited into somewhat less activity than usual, which is termed ennui, or irksomeness of life.] ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... that religion is a divine possibility for all of us. Indeed it is more than a possibility: it is a necessity if life is ever to seem complete. Without it all other things fail in the end to hold off attacks of disappointment and ennui. Because we were made with the capacity for it, we cannot be content without it. It may take many years for a man to discover that without religion life is going to be a failure; and it is that discovery that constitutes for many the tragedy of middle life. In early days the varied ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... 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 priest-tailor sew on his new garment the ruffle of baptism; the soldier in his gaudy uniform; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... once, and recovery 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
... imprisonment, no more cold and sickness, no more watching of your children when they are suffering and you cannot help; to the rich it means no more triumph of rivals, and envy, and jealousy; no more sleepless nights and ennui of days; no more gout, and gravel, and the despair of growing old. Death! It is the great emancipation. And people talk of ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... 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 ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... years; but I do not know if I shall be able to write their history before I go to join them. It is already quite a long time since I became an old man. One day last year, on the Pont des Arts, one of my fellow members at the Institute was lamenting before me over the ennui ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... of the living,—squalor and beggary gaining ground with each day, and commerce, with few exceptions, converted into monopoly; yet the populace remains attached to its old habits, and will have its pleasure. If the earnings are little, what then? Must one die of ennui? The caffe is depopulated: not so the drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of the lottery, the offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of families, who stint their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of golden illusion.... At the worst, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... after this, I remained at the post with my solitary man, endeavouring by all the means in my power to dispel ennui; but it was a hard task. Sometimes I shouldered my gun and ranged about the forest in search of game, and occasionally took a swim in the sea. I was ignorant at the time, however, that there were sharks in the Gulf ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... stars, and on the dim, uncertain shore of time the tide of man's vitality ebbs faint and low. There is no blight so fell as the blight of enforced calm. It is in the unworked garden that weeds grow. It is in the stagnant water that disease germs waken to horrid life. Ennui palls upon a brave heart. Ennui is like a long-winded, amiable, but watery-idea'd friend who drops in to see us and dribbles platitudes until every nerve is tapped. Ennui is like being forced to drink tepid water ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... 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 drive her ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... remark, 'of thirty years' uninterrupted enjoyment and prosperity to him.' It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to brood incessantly on abstract ideas, that never feel ennui. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... who thinks a fatal experiment on the peace of a family a better thing than watching the palpitations in the heart of a flea in a microscope; who plots the ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui. His gaiety, such as it is, arises from the success of his treachery; his ease from the torture he has inflicted on others. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten incidents, he takes ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... effects were produced in many cases that fell under our notice, in which the persons operated on were in a weak state of health, by weariness or ennui, by monotony, and by ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... 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 ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and fond of the society of ladies. In appearance he was ugly, with a large head, weak eyes, a big nose, a retreating forehead and chin. In temperament he was calm and cheerful. "I have had very few sorrows," he says, "and still less ennui."—"Study has been to me a sovereign remedy against the troubles of life, and I have never had a grief that an hour's reading would not dissipate." He was shy, he tells us, but less among bright people ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... 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 dirty gendarmes ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... mind how this fine gentleman would feel the boredom of that dreary day. True, it would be but a day; but these men were not tolerant of the people who made time pass heavily with them, and they revenged their own ennui on all around them. How he would snub the old man for the son's pretensions, and sneer at the young man for his disproportioned ambition; and last of all, how he would mystify poor Kate, till she never knew whether he cared ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... head. He pulled down his vest, felt his tie and winked boldly as he passed a pretty girl. He broke into a whistle presently, practising the latest rag-time air with an earnestness which found no ennui in repetition of tune, and it was while thus absorbed that he went by the Jessup Grill. He was well beyond the entrance before he realized that his name was being called and that somebody had darted out from the ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and "the set" seemed changed. She had sometimes suffered from ennui in Africa, even from loneliness in the first months there. She had got up dreading the empty days, and had often longed to have a party in the evening to look forward to. In England she realized that not only had she ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... used recreation increases one's powers for serious pursuits. Pursued wrongly, pursued as the main concern of life, amusement makes all serious work seem stale and dull; and finally makes amusement itself dull and stale too. Ennui, loathing, disgust, and emptiness are the marks of the amusement-seeker the world over. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. All things are full of weariness. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing"—this is the experience ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... 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
... pleasures, his labors, almost his fame; he is sick, and weary of life, which to him has become a blank. Pity it is, he could not have died when "Cromwell" was completed. He drags on his forlorn life, without wife or children, and with only a few friends, in disease and ennui and discontent, almost ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... lose it, so that can never be an impelling motive; and as for independence, what is that, when one can never be freed from himself? In short, I should say one so circumstanced as you are would die of ennui; that his mind, constantly thrown back upon itself, must, sooner or later, result in a weariness even worse than death itself. However, I am only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... salon, under the bright flood of light shed by the chandeliers; and when she was gone, it seemed to him that the little Japanese salon was positively empty and that night had fallen on it. Profound ennui at once overcame him, while Marianne, in a happy frame of mind, on returning to Kayser's studio, reviewed the incidents of that evening, recalling Vaudrey's restless smile, and seeming again to hear Rosas's confidences, while she thought: "He spoke to me of the past almost in ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... words, "that in the human species, still more sensitive than curious, more anxious for pleasure than for instruction, nothing pleases generally, or for a long time, unless the style is agreeable; that dry truth is killed by ennui!" Yet Bailly makes few proselytes; and a species of instinct determines men of science to despise the fruits of so persevering a labour; and D'Alembert goes so far as to tax them with poverty, even with hollow ideas, with vain and ridiculous efforts; he goes so far as to call ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 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 ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... us, as their treatment progresses, how far such indulgence is of use or free from hurtful influences. Cases of extreme neurasthenia in men accompanied with nutritive failures require as to this matter cautious handling, because, for some reason, the ennui of rest and seclusion is far better borne by women than ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... that life is so self-sufficient here that there is no need for anyone to get anywhere. What I don't quite understand is how you manage to pass your days without ennui." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Bueno 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 ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... is a brilliant masquerade; But when of the first sight you've had your fill, It palls—at least it does so upon me, This paradise of pleasure and ennui." ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... being your guest, and what will it matter if I wait a little?" While these apologies were yet being spoken, Shih-yin had already walked out into the front parlour. During his absence, Yue-ts'un occupied himself in turning over the pages of some poetical work to dispel ennui, when suddenly he heard, outside the window, a woman's cough. Yue-ts'un hurriedly got up and looked out. He saw at a glance that it was a servant girl engaged in picking flowers. Her deportment was out of the common; her eyes so bright, her eyebrows so well defined. Though ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 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 ne veux ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... training as a nurse, she'd go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman revue was out of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains, which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her routine as well as she could, and ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... obscure to someone who wasn't completely familiar with the field involved. Malone and cybernetics were not exactly bosom buddies, and by the time he finished reading through the report he was suffering from an extreme case of ennui. ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... might seem, we have the truth at last, the explanation, perhaps, of all the extraordinary ennui and neglect that had made such an invasion as that of Alaric, as that of Radagaisus, as this of Attila, possible. For it is only what is in the mind that is of any importance. The empire rightly understood was not about to die, but to change into a new spiritual kingdom in the hearts ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... into a sort 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... kept time to its monotony by a few movements of the hands endlessly repeated, turning out boxes and boxes and boxes, all alike. I saw, heard, and felt almost nothing. My hands moved unconsciously and instinctively. At this time, I think, the first feeling of profound ennui came to me, that feeling which to shake off I would at a later time do anything, anything, no matter how violent and extreme it was. Only at noon time when the whistle shrieked did I seem alive, and then I ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... four, 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 malodours ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... position places 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 ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... real or supposed. In a short time he purchased a few small vessels, and annexed the islet of Pianosa. These affairs and the formation of an Imperial Court for the delectation of his mother and his sister Pauline, who now joined him, served to drive away ennui; but he bitterly resented the Emperor Francis's refusal to let his wife and son come to him. Whether Marie Louise would have come is more than doubtful, for her relations to Count Neipperg were already notorious; but the detention of his son was a heartless action that aroused general sympathy for ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... 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
... Mr. Britton, with a smile. "Work! Just as soon as you are able, find some work to do. Did we but know it, work is the surest antidote for the poisonous discontent and ennui of this world, the swiftest panacea for its pains and miseries; different forms to suit different cases, but every form brings healing and blessing, even down to the humblest ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... 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 stupid ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... which you live and carry out the destiny that was decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a basket made of green withes, plaited. From time to time, as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from it you come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... himself if he should go up and interrupt the harmony. At last he judged that Isabel had seen him, and this accident determined him. There should be no marked holding off. He took his way to the upper regions and on the staircase met Ralph Touchett slowly descending, his hat at the inclination of ennui and his hands ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... but a woman of thirty, plump, solid, with the tiniest wrinkles of past unhappiness or ennui at the corners of her mouth; but her eyes radiant with sweetness, and her hair appealingly soft and brown above her wide, calm forehead. She was gowned in lavender crepe de Chine, with panniers of satin elaborately sprinkled ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... nightmares, marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value—the human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with the reader. La-Bas is a more artistic creation, on a more solid foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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 meditated over this hypothesis for a moment ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... inconsolable, et dedans sa mmoire Enfermer un ennui, N'est-ce pas se har pour acqurir la gloire De ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... plaits, -and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in the country than in town, because one can avoid it there, and has more resources; but it is there too. I fear 'tis growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before me. They say there is no English word for ennui;(847) I think you may translate it most literally by what is called "entertaining people," and "doing the honours:" that is, you sit an hour with somebody ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... existence it is of course impossible to do more than conjecture. The necessities of primitive man may have stimulated his inventive powers into originating and developing the useful arts for his physical comfort and convenience; and his desire for recreation after labour, or the mere ennui of idleness, may have urged the same powers into originating and developing the fine and plastic arts for the entertainment of his mind. Or, lastly, if no better reason can be found, and though Sir Joshua Reynolds laid it down that all models of perfection in art must be sought for on the earth, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... the godfather is a second father, we beg the reader to lay to our account, and not to that of the Comte de la Fere, the pleasure or the ENNUI he may experience. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... perishing of ennui in the lonely office of the absentee steel construction agents, had been installed as stenographer in Room 66 a year earlier. Miss Farrell had, it appeared, served Bassett several terms as stenographer to one of the legislative committees of ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... 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
... were so old, so melancholy, these rooms of dead and gone ladies. How much of life had been lived here, how much of hope had been smothered with these walls! What aching love and fiery hate had vibrated here, only to smolder into helpless ennui under the endless weight of tedious days.... She shivered slightly, oppressed by the dreams of these ancient rooms, dreams ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... disappears; but love is the unfathomed eternal sea itself. Or—to shift the metaphor—Amour is a general under whom youth must serve: Curiosity and Lustiness are his recruiting officers, and it is well to fight under his colors, for it is against Ennui that he marshals his forces. 'Tis a resplendent conflict, and young blood cannot but stir and exult as paradoxes, marching and countermarching at the command of their gay generalissimo, make way for one another in iridescent squadrons, while ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... 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 tale-tellers ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... who exhibited a few scenes of the insolence of office in the attendants of great men, and the obtrusive importunity of place-seekers, in a manner that pleased us much more than a dance would have done. Conversation was kept up very well, and the visit passed off without any feeling of ennui, or anything whatever to recollect with regret. The ladies looked at us from their apartments through gratings, and without our being able to see them very distinctly. We were anxious to see the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... grave and measured turn. But perhaps you will only too soon have new pretensions, and the Countess by new disputes will doubtless re-animate your liaison. Too constant a peace is productive of a deadly ennui. Uniformity kills love, for as soon as the spirit of method mingles in an affair of the heart, the passion disappears, languor supervenes, weariness begins to wear, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... lines movement could only be made ON THE TOP and fully exposed to enemy snipers, who, suffering badly from forced inactivity and ennui, delighted to exercise their shooting powers by a few minutes' pleasant concentration ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... ordinary 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 which I ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "Why, it's Roy Gilbert!" and ran towards the courtyard. The car finally disgorged Nettie Gilbert and her uninteresting fourteen-year-old daughter. They came in for luncheon, and their story was soon told. Paris was hot, and in despair of dispelling Roy's thickening ennui at his European exile, which threatened to terminate their trip, Mrs. Gilbert had induced her husband to charter the car for a tour of Normandy and Brittany. Having done all the north-coast watering-places and remembering that the Bragdons were staying at this little place "with a ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... fellow, my life is one long fight against ennui. Danger, excitement, the hazard of my precious life—such pleasures of ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... he is such a pearl of husbands, if you live so much like turtle-doves-and, to tell the truth, I do not believe a word of it—what causes this ennui of which you complain and which has been perfectly noticeable for some time? When I say ennui, it is more than that; it is sadness, it is grief? You grow thinner every day; you are as pale as a ghost; just at this moment, your complexion is gone; you will end by being a regular fright. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... more than king's renown, Beloved alike in country and in town; In hotter climes oft mingled with the jet Of falling fountains; whilst the cigarette Kisses the fair one's lips, and by thy breath Redeems the wearied heart from ennui's death. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... philosopher he was, to reconcile himself to his hope deferred. Few people were more easily susceptible of consolation than Lord Mauleverer. He found an agreeable lady, of a face more unfaded than her reputation, to whom he intrusted the care of relieving his leisure moments from ennui; and being a lively woman, the confidante discharged the trust with great satisfaction to Lord Mauleverer, for the space of a fortnight, so that he naturally began to feel his love for Lucy gradually wearing ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... l'attrape en volant; il a de la grace et de la finesse dans ce qu'il dit mais il ne sais pas causer de suite; il est distrait, indifferent; il s'ennuierait souvent sans une tres bonne recette qu'il a contre l'ennui, c'est de s'endormir quand il veut. C'est un talent que je lui envie bien; si je l'avais, j'en ferais grand usage. Il est malin sans etre mechant; il est officieux, poli; hors son milord March, il n'aime rien: on ne saurait former aucune liaison avec lui, mais ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... had the honour of being your guest, and what will it matter if I wait a little?" While these apologies were yet being spoken, Shih-yin had already walked out into the front parlour. During his absence, Y-ts'un occupied himself in turning over the pages of some poetical work to dispel ennui, when suddenly he heard, outside the window, a woman's cough. Y-ts'un hurriedly got up and looked out. He saw at a glance that it was a servant girl engaged in picking flowers. Her deportment was out of the common; her eyes so bright, her eyebrows so well ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... ecstatic, edict, eerie, 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, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the indigenous, the simplified, and she was willing 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 ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... 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
... Not only 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
... purpose to me." The King then began to talk about his morning's sport, and Lansmatte. It was necessary to 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 begin ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Anglomania. But now we ought to be able to acquire whatever accent we choose, even when living far away from every instructor, having the gramophone to repeat to us untiringly the true Spanish "manana" and the French "ennui." And the study of phonetics, so much developed within the last few years, makes it unpardonable for teachers of modern languages to let ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... the saloon the hardier passengers were striving to subdue the ennui of an interval before they sought their cabins. Some talked. One hardened reprobate strummed the piano. Others played cards, chess, draughts, anything that ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... "If one could have a fine house, full of nice 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
... be against anything for your happiness, my dear," he answered; "but have you considered what it would be to spend your life with a man that has not three ideas! not a resource for occupying himself—a regular prey to ennui—one whom you could never respect!" He had grown more and more vehement, and Flora put her handkerchief to her eyes, for tears of ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Street would fill volumes: both sides are always right, or wrong—it matters little, and is simply a point of view. But the rancor of it all, if seen from heaven, must serve finely to dispel the monotony of the place—a panacea for paradisiacal ennui. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877 Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, helas! cette piece est en vers, et l'ennui s'y promene librement entre ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... insolence of office in the attendants of great men, and the obtrusive importunity of place-seekers, in a manner that pleased us much more than a dance would have done. Conversation was kept up very well, and the visit passed off without any feeling of ennui, or anything whatever to recollect with regret. The ladies looked at us from their apartments through gratings, and without our being able to see them very distinctly. We were anxious to see the tombs of the late Raja, the elder brother of the present, who lately died, and that of his son, which ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... fear of ennui which seems to cloud your future, that Mary and I had not succeeded so happily as we imagined, in ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... our own conscience"; or from Pascal: "Habit is a second nature which destroys the original one." Nietzsche says: "Many do not find their heart until they have lost their head"; Voltaire: "The secret of ennui is to have said everything"; Jean Paul: "Sorrows are like the clouds in a thunderstorm; they look black in the distance, but over us hardly gray." Once more I quote Nietzsche: "The same emotions are different in their rhythm for man and woman: therefore ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... libraries, the doors of which they politely threw open for the benefit of their military guests; and thus, by reading, fishing, and boating, we were enabled to make head, with some success, against the encroachments of ennui. It must be confessed, however, that in spite of strenuous efforts to the contrary, that determined enemy of all idle persons was beginning to gain ground upon us, when, about mid-day on the 24th of July, a cry of land was heard from the mast-head. All eyes were immediately turned ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... gloved hand upon Merton Gill's sleeve, she allured him. The assistant paused before them. The Spanish girl continued to allure. Merton Gill stared moodily at the half-empty wine glass, then exhaled smoke as he glanced up at his companion in profound ennui. If it was The Blight of Broadway probably they would ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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. Bugrov came, unpacked his presents, and ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... degradation adapt him to the rougher, or rudimental departments and pursuits of civilization. Pity for him on account of the labor which makes his sleep sweet, and his digestion perfect, is thrown away. He knows nothing of the ennui of sloth, nor the misanthropy of idle declaimers. He has his rude affections, and does not hate wrongs which he does not know nor feel, nor is he shocked at manacles which he cannot see, and which hold him from falling into the abyss of barbarism, ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... Europe as consul, Uncle Tom's Cabin was already published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... taking. Not only that, but I felt the need of intercourse—of intercourse of a lighter and more convivial nature with men and women who saw life as I saw it. In the evenings when we did not go out into that world our city afforded ennui took possession of me: I had never learned to care for books, I had no resources outside of my profession, and when I was not working on some legal problem I dawdled over the newspapers and went to bed. I don't mean to imply that our existence, outside of our continued intimacy with the Peterses ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... diplomatists dined alternately with 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 engaged (Memoirs ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... her about her friend. Rebecca's wit, spirits, and accomplishments troubled her with a rueful disquiet. They were only a week married, and here was George already suffering ennui, and eager for others' society! She trembled for the future. How shall I be a companion for him, she thought—so clever and so brilliant, and I such a humble foolish creature? How noble it was of him to marry me—to give up everything and stoop down to me! ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sparingly scattered 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 ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... feared that after the completion of those graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame M; auunster would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities of ennui. But as yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a restless soul, and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said, into any situation that lay before her. Up to a certain point her restlessness might be counted upon to ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... steeped myself in the reviving air of the ocean, the sight of the rich waters through the windows of the saloon, the books in the library, the compiling of my memoirs, took up all my time, and left me not a moment of ennui or weariness. ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... walking, and talking. Mr. Wroth quotes a Frenchman, who, after visiting Ranelagh in 1800, calls it 'le plus insipide lieu d'amusement que l'on ait pu imaginer,' and even hints at Dante's Purgatory. An earlier victim from Gaul thus records his experience of Ranelagh: 'On s'ennui avec de la mauvaise musique, du the et du beurre.' So true is it that the cheerfulness you find anywhere is the cheerfulness you have brought with you. However, despite the Frenchman, good music and singing were at times to be heard at Ranelagh. The nineteenth ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... 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
... 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 ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... plans of 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
... light, but they had these things in common—they all dressed in black and white, their hair was lofty and of exaggerated waterfall, and their expressions never altered from one of lazy-eyed, lofty, scornful ennui. To Bobby they were easily the leading ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... 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? She lay ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state of their shadowy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... spot. endurer, to endure, put up with. 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. ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... wear a red coat and an epaulette; to be called captain; to figure at a ball; to lounge away time in country sports, at country quarters, was never, even in times of peace, creditable; but it is now absurd and base. Submitting to a certain portion of ennui and contempt, this mode of life for an officer was formerly practicable—but now cannot be submitted to without utter, irremediable disgrace. Officers are now, in general, men of education and information; want of knowledge, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... 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
... family, we suppose, who think of 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 ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... from 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 ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... silks and furs and a marvelous necklace of diamonds, she sat with superior mien in an opera box. Now and again, with an air of infinite ennui and disdain, she glanced coolly aloft through her lorgnette at the eager poor in the steep, ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... brilliant masquerade; But when of the first sight you've had your fill, It palls—at least it does so upon me, This paradise of pleasure and ennui." ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... as being, neither more nor less, ennui (in fact the thought now expressed on his face did resemble ennui), caused, they said, by the sudden cessation of business and the change from an active life ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... 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 dust and weariness. I have had, of necessity, to leave ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was useless, and resulted in nothing but the frost-biting of the limbs of some of the hunters, as Melville Island was deserted at the end of October by all animals except wolves and foxes. To get through the long winter without dying of ennui was no easy matter, but the officers hit upon the plan of setting up a theatre, the first representation in which was given on the 6th November, the day of the disappearance of the sun for three months. A special piece was given on Christmas day, in which allusion was made ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... a few other French words which like 'prestige' are at this moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they shall become such, or no. Such are 'ennui', 'exploitation', 'verve', 'persiflage', 'badinage', 'chicane', 'finesse', and others; all of them often employed by us,—and it is out of such frequent employment that adoption proceeds,—because expressing shades of meaning not expressed by any words of our own{67}. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... evening meal in the tent door, to the couch on the friendly earth, to the yells of the muleteers, to 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 ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... to do? I have thought it over carefully. I think, my friend, that you will have to marry a Mrs. Shandy, who will know nothing of love or of passion, and will not trouble herself about Madame de Mortsauf or Lady Dudley; who will be wholly indifferent to those moments of ennui which you call melancholy, during which you are as lively as a rainy day,—a wife who will be to you, in short, the excellent sister of charity whom you are seeking. But as for loving, quivering at a word, anticipating happiness, giving it, receiving it, experiencing all the tempests of passion, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... 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 and peevish, and the necessity ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... 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 ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Our arrangements being made, therefore, I sat down on a camp-stool, whilst Penelope reclined on the grass; and I endeavoured to explain to her the great advantages of a moderate constitutional government, with checks, balances, and so forth. Although she yawned, I am sure it was not from ennui, but in order to shew ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... 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 mysteries ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... 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 do with women and their attitude toward ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... rest of my life. But that's rather touching too, his not 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 meditated ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Olivier 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 ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... a well-regulated character, saves from idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, those tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations of humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man; and which are potent in her, for evil ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... know that I had committed social manslaughter until the colonel exclaimed when we were in the corridor: 'Oh you republicans—you republicans, how you do like to show royalty its place!'" Medill has another version. He declares that Henry stood the king's obvious ennui as long as he could, then he rose and cried: "O King! live for ever, but Medill and I must pull our freight!" This version probably is apochryphal! The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated: "Well, how ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... he expressed his fear lest the cabins had not contained every convenience that caprice might expect. He was excited; surely he was happy! Audrey persuaded herself that this must, after all, be his true normal condition while aboard the yacht, and that the ennui visible on his features a moment earlier could only have ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... of no more 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 the brightness ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... live to be the ruler of life, not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms, To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable, And nothing exterior shall ever take ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... difference in temperament, can be found than the description which each gives of the Ordre de Bon Temps. To Champlain belongs the credit of inventing this pleasant means of promoting health and banishing ennui, but all he tells of it is this: 'By the rules of the Order a chain was put, with some little ceremony, on the neck of one of our company, commissioning him for the day to go a-hunting. The next day it was conferred upon another, and thus in succession. All exerted ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... went back again to his own kind—to the prattling, the well-groomed, the ultra-fashionables of both mind and body. And there on the shining tennis-courts and the soft golf greens, through the late yellow afternoon and the first gray threat of twilight, the old sickening ennui came creeping back to his senses, warring chaotically there with the natural nervous reaction of his recent adventure, till just out of sheer morbid unrest, as soon as the flower-scented, candle-lighted dinner hour was over, he went stalking round and round ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... LOYAL "Myrtilla (lest a scandal rise The lady's name I thus disguise), Dying of ennui, once decided— Much on resource herself she prided— To choose a hat. Forthwith she flies On that momentous enterprise. Whether to Petit or Logros, I know not: only this I know;— Headdresses then, of any fashion, Bore names of quality, or passion. Myrtilla tried them, almost all: ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... slightly crossed with an ennui that was peculiarly intense this morning, rendered the Eye more monstrous than it was. It expanded to horrible size, growing mountainous; it turned into a volcano in the tropics, and yet it stared ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... woman's turn; she silenced him with a gesture of infinite ennui. "Why is it," she complained, "that you never get anywhere without talking all around ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... these contented people. He was perhaps too much in the other extreme. He could not, without overt words or looks of indignation, endure the presence of those whose characters or principles he despised—he could not, even without manifest symptoms of restlessness or ennui, submit long to live with mere companions; he required to have friends; nor could he make a friend from ordinary materials, however smooth the grain, or however fine the polish they might take. Even when the gay world at Castle Hermitage ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... else, Shakspeare has proved himself a great poet: the whole is merely a slight sketch, but in elegance and delicate propriety it will hardly ever be excelled. Neither has he overlooked the irony which the subject naturally suggested: the great lord, who is driven by idleness and ennui to deceive a poor drunkard, can make no better use of his situation than the latter, who every moment relapses into his vulgar habits. The last half of this prelude, that in which the tinker, in his new state, again drinks himself out of his senses, and is transformed in his sleep into his former ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... this proposition received amused the baron instead of offending him, and passing into a more conversational tone, he proposed to her to leave this abode of ennui, where even the poor satyrs on the hangings were holding their big hands over their mouths to hide their yawns, and go with him ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... this time I got an idea I could devise an apparatus by which four messages could simultaneously be sent over a single wire without interfering with each other. I now had five shops, and with experimenting on this new scheme I was pretty busy; at least I did not have ennui." ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... not afflicted with curiosity as to each other's past. The chief is under sealed orders; both German and Russian had left their respective countries for good of Kaiser and Tsar; the American is an adventurous son of millionaire residing in New York. Weary of ennui in the metropolis, this Yankee aristocrat seeks diversion in trips to all parts of the globe. All of these are ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... chiefly through a feeling of ennui that Madame Dambreuse had yielded. But this latest experience was not to be wasted. She desired to give herself up to an absorbing passion; and so she began to heap on his head adulations ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... aboard the Pacific liner about to sail from San Francisco, preceded by a fur coat, a gun-case, two pigskin bags, a hat-box, and a valet. He was tall and slender, and moved with an air of fastidious distinction. He wore a small mustache, a monocle, and an expression of unutterable ennui. His costume consisted of a smart tweed traveling-suit, with cap to match, white spats, and a pair of binoculars swung across his shoulders. In his eyes was the look, carefully maintained, of one who has sounded the depths ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... fear on that score. My profession will give me plenty of work; besides, what is the use of education, if it be not to render it impossible for a man to know the meaning of the word ennui? Put me alone in the waiting-room of some little wayside station to wait three hours for a train, and I should still be perfectly happy, even if there were no such thing as a book ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... so-called society being absent at the various spas or baths of Germany. One member of the British legation, who remained at his post to represent the mission, and myself, making common cause of our desolation and ennui, spent much of our time together, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... One night at a restaurant I was given change in stamps and tried to get even with the house by unloading them as his tip on the waiter. He protested eloquently. "Letters I never write," he explained. "To write letters makes me ennui. And yet if I wrote for a hundred years I could not use all the stamps my patrons have ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... there is. In England you can go out every day, and at all hours; and then, to those who love variety, like myself, you are not sure of seeing the same sky every morning you rise, which, for my part, I think the greatest of all existing sources of ennui.' ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... examples. For years uncountable it has been called a cruel job to earn your living honestly and to satisfy the absolute needs of many people by quickly and painlessly slaughtering cattle. But, when somebody, just for the sake of killing time, because of ennui, shoots and martyrs harmless animals, or merely so wounds them that if they are not retrieved they must die terrible deaths, we call it noble sport. I should like to see a demonstration of the difference between killing an ox and shooting a stag. The latter does not require even superior ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... few crumbs that might be thrown her; 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 ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... stop work temporarily is not the only way to meet a plateau, and fatigue or ennui is probably not the sole or most compelling explanation. It may be that we should not regard the objective results as the true measure of learning; perhaps learning is going on even though the results are ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Rome, the popularity of the recitations gradually decreased. No poet of equal attractiveness was left to hold them. So the ennui and disgust, which had perhaps long been smothered, now burst forth. Many people refused to attend altogether. They sent their servants, parasites, or hired applauders, while they themselves strolled in the public squares or spent the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... 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, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... doubt 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 ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of a town nevrose. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value—the human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with the reader. La-Bas is a more artistic creation, on a more solid foundation. It is a study of Satanism, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... her heart was given to one of the sons of light, instead of the children of darkness. For awhile his sin-dyed spirit seemed to bleach in the whitening atmosphere that surrounded him, for a father's as well as a husband's joy was his. But at length the demon of ennui possessed him. Satan was discontented in the bowers of Paradise. Gabriel sighed for his profligate companions, in the bosom of wedded love and joy. He left home on a false pretence, and never returned. It was long before ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... oases, separated by whole deserts of the most wearisome ennui. For weeks, perhaps, those who were not fortunate enough to be living hard and getting fatigued every day in the boats were yawning away their existence in an atmosphere only comparable to that of an orchid-house, a life in view of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... celebration is the natural sequel, and if there are delicacies which in civilization are more palatable than usual, why not take them to where they will receive a still fuller and heartier appreciation? There is a corresponding rise in the "tide of life" and the ennui of the same task, in the same place, in the same wind, is not so noticeable. So we did not forget our asparagus and ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... provocations from the present,—his feeling, haste mainly, and need of getting through! The very Crown-Prince, I should guess, was as good as indifferent to this antique Cadet of the Hohenzollerns; and looked on Nurnberg and the old white Castle with little but ENNUI: the Princess of England, and black cares on her beautiful account and his own, possess him too exclusively. But in truth we do not even know what day they arrived or departed; much less what they ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... London and "the set" seemed changed. She had sometimes suffered from ennui in Africa, even from loneliness in the first months there. She had got up dreading the empty days, and had often longed to have a party in the evening to look forward to. In England she realized that not only had she got a habit of Claude, but that she had ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... threatened from behind. The head and the whole figure were bowed as if under a burden, although I could not see that he had anything upon his shoulders; and his gait was not that of a man who is walking off the ennui of a voyage, but rather of a criminal flying, or of a startled ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... 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. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... guilty of treason against the new allegiance which she seemed to have taken upon herself in accepting Mrs Stumfold's invitation; and she had done it at last not from any firm resolve of which she might have been proud, but had been driven to it by ennui, and by the easy temptation of Miss Todd's neighbouring door. She had, therefore, slipped out, and finding her wicked friend to be not at home, had hurried back again. She had, however, committed herself to a card, and she knew that Mrs Stumfold would hear ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... rehearsal, but I have it in the 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 hand linger awhile on his bare neck. Already, it will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... a pistol, cocked it, and said, laughing, "Here, gentlemen, is the universal panacea for all woes, the spleen, or ennui." He placed the muzzle laughingly ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... 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
... cards, bed; to rise 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 next morning. In America, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... 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
... no other passengers for the east-bound Flyer; and finding he still had some minutes to wait, Ormsby lounged into the telegraph office. Here the bonds of ennui were loosened by the gradual development of a little mystery. First the telephone bell rang smartly, and when the telegraph operator took down the ear-piece and said "Well?" in the imperious tone common to his ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... 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 his most characteristic production—but ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... point d'art, d'ennui scientifique; Piccini, Gluck, n'ont point note les airs. Nature seule en dicta la musique, Et Marmontel n'en ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... smoking a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye. Seeing the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed with interest. He stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight convulsive start when he discerned ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... a state of youth, in which health and pleasure kept me from ennui; but he had chosen one of old age. He was a savant, and cared only for science; and thus youth, with its thousand pleasures, would have constantly drawn him from its study. An old man meditates better than a young one. Althotas died a victim to his love of science: I lead ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... from active trades Have plung'd into sequester'd shades, Will dismally assure ye, That it's a harder task to bear Th' ennui produced by country air, And sigh for Urbs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... of getting 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper, one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing new is, and nothing true is, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... 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 ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... of nausea of sweet things, and made the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the fold. Such, judging by the history of ages, appears to be the meaning of that emblematic serpent to which Eve listened, in all probability, out of ennui. This deduction may seem a little venturesome to Protestants, who take the book of Genesis more seriously ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... quick and gross feeder. It has a thousand different ways of assimilating things "light as air," or things dull from the ennui which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... 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 ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the 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 dandies gaping from another ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 one ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... not aware of this distinction, although it seems evident to me. Can it be that true feeling is of no value in a piece of literature, as some of the decadents have thought? Can it be that enthusiasm, weariness, loathing, distress and ennui never transpire through the pages of a book? Indubitably none of them transpire unless the reader enters into the spirit of the work. And, in general, the reader does not enter into the spirit of my books. I cherish a hope which, perhaps, may be chimerical and ridiculous, that ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... and walrus whiskers that emitted a rasping Bueno 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
... laden with packages, then went out again, and in the street was assailed by an immense ennui. After an interminable tour of the quays he finally tumbled into a beer hall. He fell on a bench and ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... mother, is a man who absorbs you, he uses up the vital fluid of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be amused by those who call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no one ever comes: none visit us but those whose intentions are evidently dishonorable for him, and who endeavor, unsuccessfully, to amuse ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... all these effects converge, paralyzing in the nation the best half of the soul, and, worse still, to leading the will astray and perverting the public mind, transforming generous impulses into evil outbursts, and organizing lasting inertia, ennui, discontent, discord, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... "It saved 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 ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... without rest or goal? Can this storm and stress give form and nourishing juice to the everliving plant of humankind, that grows and fashions itself in quiet? This empty, restless activity is only a bad habit of the north and brings nothing but ennui for oneself and for others. And with what does it begin and end except with antipathy to the world in general, which is now such a common feeling? Inexperienced vanity does not suspect that it indicates ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... your air and jaded; Sabbath hours have lost their zest; Utter ennui has invaded Every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... states of consciousness become combined, not 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 very frequent in dreams and reveries, i.e., in a state ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... order not to break the heart 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 murder as a fine art, and was regarded (by the ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... with the tedious irony of ennui, "is one indebted for this unexpected honour on the part of the First Under-Secretary of the British Secret Service? Or whatever your high-sounding ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... French philosopher, Mr. Helvetius, has deduced almost all our actions from this principle of their relieving us from the ennui or taedium vitae; and true it is, that our desires or aversions are the motives of all our voluntary actions; and human nature seems to excel other animals in the more facil use of this voluntary power, and on that account is more liable to insanity than ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Wycherley; "Insomnia is the commonest feature. To resume; the insidious advance of morbid thought is next marked by high spirits, or else by low spirits; generally the latter. The patient begins by moping, then shows great lassitude and ennui, then becomes abstracted, moody, and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... was quite willing that Ruth should look upon his life-work as a pleasant pastime to save him from ennui. Even to his wife a man is not always eager to exhibit his soul in ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... am a Frenchman through Paris: and if he thought so three centuries ago, what must it be now, when we see so many persons of extraordinary intellect collected in one city, and so many accustomed to employ that intellect in adding to the pleasures of conversation. The demon of ennui has always pursued me; by the terror with which he inspires me, I could alone have been capable of bending the knee to tyranny, if the example of my father, and his blood which flows in my veins, had not enabled me to triumph over this weakness. Be that as it may, Bonaparte ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman revue was out of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains, which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her routine as well as ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... business, retire with a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests and excitements that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no one thinks of the parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid what they are told is their debt to society—having brought up a family ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... entire poem I never escape that sensation of the ennui which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore. There never was anything French about Hugo's genius. Hugo was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a metaphysical ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... closing in of an evening in autumn, I 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... rule, yes. I have been fifteen years at St. Peter's awaiting that day when through pure ennui the examiners will pass me. It will be a sad wrench to leave the dear old home." He continued, a tinge of melancholy in his voice: "You know, I am the last of the old brigade. The medical student no longer ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... drives dull care and ennui away by indulging in private theatricals; this winter they organized an amateur company, called themselves the "Teheran Bulbuls," and, with burnt-corked faces and grotesque attire, they rehearsed and perfected themselves in "Uncle Ebenezer's Visit to New York," which, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... greeting left nothing to be desired; she who had been somewhat unmindful of him lately on a sudden seemed really glad to see him. His slightly tired, aristocratic face lightened; the sunshine of Jocelyn Wray's eyes, the tonic of youth radiating from her, were sufficient to alleviate, if not dispel, ennui or lassitude. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... with people if their 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 ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
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