Wearisome Quotes & Sayings

If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin. — Rudyard Kipling

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed. — Sylvia Plath

As i emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. — Joseph Conrad

The sabbath was made for men. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things - science , nation , money, religion, schools - which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one's interest as a human being , and , having become aware , to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind. It's almost wearisome, the way one always comes back to the same point. Wouldn't it be nice , for a change , if there were another way out of our difficulties! A short cut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some " enemy of society" to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a does of calomel. — Aldous Huxley

For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory. — Glenway Wescott

I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace. — Marie Brennan

I enjoy comedy but it can become wearisome. — Steve Coogan

It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Relief work does not consist entirely in wearisome appeals ... it has its moments of enchantment, its adventures, its unexpected vistas into new worlds — Eglantyne Jebb

The best books ...
The best books of men are soon exhausted
they are cisterns, and not springing fountains.
You enjoy them very much at the first acquaintance,
and you think you could hear them a hundred times over-
but you could not- you soon find them wearisome.
Very speedily a man eats too much honey:
even children at length are cloyed with sweets.
All human books grow stale after a time-
but with the Word of God the desire to study it increases,
while the more you know of it the less you think you know.
The Book grows upon you: as you dive into its depths
you have a fuller perception of the infinity which remains
to be explored. You are still sighing to enjoy more of that
which it is your bliss to taste. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Most vices ... demand considerable self-sacrifice. There is no greater mistake than to suppose the vicious life is the life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful - if strenuously led - as Christian's in Pilgrims Progress. — Aldous Huxley

There are three ways of learning golf: by study, which is the most wearisome; by imitation, which is the most fallacious; and by experience, which is the most bitter. — Robert Browning

There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. — John O'Donohue

It is a wearisome disease to preserve health by too strict a regimen. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive. — Marcel Proust

Picture, n. A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three. — Ambrose Bierce

The path to Heaven is narrow, rough and full of wearisome and trying ascents, nor can it be trodden without great toil; and therefore wrong is their way, gross their error, and assured their ruin who, after the testimony of so many thousands of saints, will not learn where to settle their footing. — Robert Southwell

I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. — Sylvia Plath

This business of earning your daily bread is really sad and wearisome. People come up with the most pious lies about work. It's just another abominable form of idolatry, a dog licking the rod that beats it: work. — Luther Blissett

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk! — Charles Lamb

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco. — Edward Abbey

It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. — Herman Melville

There has to be a song. There are too many dark nights, too many troublesome days, and too many wearisome miles. Somewhere deep in the forgotten corner of one's heart- there has to be a song. Like a cool, clear drink of water and like the gentle warmth of sunshine, and like the tender love of a child, there has to be a song! — Bob Benson

The endurance of monotony has about the same place in a healty mind that the endurance of darkness has: that is to say, as a strong intellect will have pleasure in the solemnities of storm and twilight, and in the broken and mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere brilliancy and glare, while a frivolous mind will dread the shadow and storm; and as a great man will be ready to endure much darkness of fortune in order to reach greater eminence of power or felicity, while an inferior man will not pay the price; exactly in like manner a great mind will accept, or even delight in, monotony which would be wearisome to an inferior intellect, because it has more patience and power of expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great future pleasure of change. — John Ruskin

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing. — Oscar Wilde

I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, that thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called 'Paradox Lost'. — G.K. Chesterton

If they examined their own hearts, they would, perhaps, find at the bottom of all this, more self-love and egotism than they think of. Self-love and egotism are bad qualities, of which the unrestrained exhibition, though it may be sometimes amusing, never fails to be wearisome and unpleasant. Couples — Charles Dickens

Bureaucratic regimentation was in fact part of the larger regimentation of life, introduced by this power-centered culture. Nothing emerges more clearly from the Pyramid Texts themselves, with their wearisome repetitions of formulae, than a colossal capacity for enduring monotony: a capacity that anticipates the peak of universal boredom achieved in our own day. This verbal compulsiveness is the psychal side of the systematic general compulsion that brought the labor machine into existence. Only those who were sufficiently docile to endure this regimen-or sufficiently infantile to enjoy it-at every stage from command to execution could become efficient units in the human machine. — Lewis Mumford

We're compensated metaphysically with the absolute freedom to define and pursue whatever it is we believe will make our lives worthwhile- a dubious birthright that imparts a wearisome burden of its own. Rather like choosing one all-important meal from an infinite menu. — Chris Chester

To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end. — Thomas Hardy

All history is nothing but wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. — Victor Hugo

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. — Agnes Repplier

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound. — Fulke Greville

Rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? — Charles Lamb

Hell had become, over the years, a wearisome speculation. Even its proselytizers have neglected it, abandoning the poor, but serviceable, human allusion which the ecclesiastic fires of the Holy Office once had in this world: a temporal torment, of course, but one that was not unworthy, within its terrestrial limitations, of being a metaphor for the immortal, for the perfect pain without destruction that the objects of divine wrath will forever endure. Whether or not this hypothesis is satisfactoy, an increasing lassitude in the propaganda of the institution is indisputable. (Do not be alarmed; I use propaganda here not in its commercial but rather in its Catholic genealogy: a congregation of cardinals.) — Jorge Luis Borges

This mountain is so formed that it is always wearisome when one begins the ascent, but becomes easier the higher one climbs. — Dante Alighieri

Lord of the springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile-sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voices of our friends. Lift up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Depend upon it, my friends, if you get tired of the Word of God, and it becomes wearisome to you, you are out of communion with Him. — D.L. Moody

Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I now I won't, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope — Jasper Fforde

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. — Henry David Thoreau

In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few. — Samuel Johnson

Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer. — Emma Donoghue

The girl forgives you, not because shehas become a saint but because she can no longer bear to carry this burden of hatred. Hating is very wearisome. — Paulo Coelho

This grows wearisome, Allixta said. How long will she carry on?
Till she gets what she wants or drops, Rune answered, the awe in his voice undisguised. My mate likes to keep things simple. — Kresley Cole

That is the wearisome part of business - there is no peace, no sense of certain, permanent achievement, no stability. The unexpected, and usually the awful, is forever happening. — Alice Foote MacDougall

There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be! — Aldous Huxley

My overcoat is worn out; my shirts also are worn out. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. — William Tyndale

Life in the country teaches one that the really stimulating things are the quiet, natural things, and the really wearisome things are the noisy, unnatural things. It is more exciting to stand still than to dance. Silence is more eloquent than speech. Water is more stimulating than wine. Fresh air is more intoxicating than cigarette smoke. Sunlight is more subtle than electric light. The scent of grass is more luxurious than the most expensive perfume. The slow, simple observations of the peasant are more wise than the most sparkling epigrams of the latest wit. — Beverley Nichols

Continued eloquence is wearisome. — Blaise Pascal

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand. — James Payn

It seems to me that it will be very wearisome to be a man. — Pierre Loti

Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines, had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. — Maxim Gorky

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him. — Pearl S. Buck

What discord we should bring into the universe if our prayers were all answered. Then we should govern the world and not God. And do you think we should govern it better? It gives me only pain when I hear the long, wearisome petitions of people asking for they know not what ... Thanks-giving with a full heart-and the rest silence and submission to the divine will! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the morning of life, before its wearisome journey, The youthful soul doth expand, in the simple luxury of being; It hath not contracted its wishes, nor set a limit on its hopes; The wing of fancy is unclipped, and sin hath not seared the feelings: Each feature is stamped with immortality, for all its desires are infinite, And it seeketh an ocean of happiness, to fill the deep hollow within. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

With every day that passed, the boy's heart became more and more
silent. It no longer wanted to know about things of the past or future; it was content simply to
contemplate the desert, and to drink with the boy from the Soul of the World. The boy and his heart had
become friends, and neither was capable now of betraying the other.
When his heart spoke to him, it was to provide a stimulus to the boy, and to give him strength, because
the days of silence there in the desert were wearisome. His heart told the boy what his strongest qualities
were: his courage in having given up his sheep and in trying to live out his destiny, and his enthusiasm
during the time he had worked at the crystal shop. — Paulo Coelho

A night spent scraping off the evidence of other people's fun is a wearisome thing. — Alex Marwood

As Samuel Johnson said, To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy. — Gretchen Rubin

Often, in the Ruy Lopez, one must be patient, wait and carry on a lengthy and wearisome struggle. — Boris Spassky

Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress. — Anton Chekhov

After a prosperous, but to me very wearisome, voyage, we came at last into port. Immediately on landing I got together my few effects; and, squeezing myself through the crowd, went into the nearest and humblest inn which first met my gaze. — Adelbert Von Chamisso

Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too. — Elizabeth Strout

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.
I want money. Unless I have it ...
In my sleep, a natural death! — Osamu Dazai

I like elven legends, they are so captivating. What a pity humans don't have any legends like that. Perhaps one day they will? Perhaps they'll create some? But what would human legends deal with? All around, wherever one looks, there's greyness and dullness. Even things which begin beautifully lead swiftly to boredom and dreariness, to that human ritual, that wearisome rhythm called life. — Andrzej Sapkowski

It is so wearisome having to represent things. That is why I refuse to look at abstract art. It is much too suggestive of the style of my thoughts, and I never think about my thoughts. — Bauvard

A Robin said: The Spring will never come,
And I shall never care to build again.
A Rosebush said: These frosts are wearisome,
My sap will never stir for sun or rain.
The half Moon said: These nights are fogged and slow,
I neither care to wax nor care to wane.
The Ocean said: I thirst from long ago,
Because earth's rivers cannot fill the main.
When Springtime came, red Robin built a nest,
And trilled a lover's song in sheer delight.
Grey hoarfrost vanished, and the Rose with might
Clothed her in leaves and buds of crimson core.
The dim Moon brightened. Ocean sunned his crest,
Dimpled his blue, yet thirsted evermore. — Christina Rossetti

You can easily see what and endless, wearisome and fruitless task it would be if I were to refute all the unconsidered objections of people who pigheadly contradict everything I say. — Augustine Of Hippo

The perpetual mourner
the grief that can never be healed
is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning
a new acquaintance with grief. — George Eliot

Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. — Julian Barnes

There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work. — Charles Spurgeon

The daily life is so wearisome; yet duty lies that way. — Charles Webster Leadbeater

Sitting at a crowded table with men who did not share a common language with you, listening to them talk and jape whilst understanding none of it, had quickly grown wearisome. Particularly since he always found himself wondering if the japes and laughter were directed at him. — George R R Martin