“Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.”

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary

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Colin Wilson192

author 1931–2013

Edwin Muir (1887–1959) British poet, novelist and translator

Scott and Scotland (1936), Introduction.

“… as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.”

Marguerite Duras book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

“This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Tel est le malheur de notre siècle, les plus étranges égarements même ne guérissent pas de l'ennui.
Vol. II, ch. XVII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

“We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Source: Vittorio, The Vampire

“that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

Attributed by James F. Rusling "Interview with President McKinley" The Christian Advocate (22 January 1903), as remarks from a meeting with clergymen on 21 November 1899. The overtly religious part is disputed in Lewis Gould (1980) The Presidency of William McKinley.