Quote

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Saul Bellow

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Saul Bellow
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 10
Died: 2005
Died: April 5
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Solomon Bellows
Real
Command
Stasis
Terror
Seasoned
Instruments
Tedium
Deep
Combine
Control
Impose
Social
Anguish
Death
Boredom
Power
Instrument

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Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions they've replaced passions with excitement.
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You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
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In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
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I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
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Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.
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It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
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A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.
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Live or die but don't poison everything.
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The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.
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We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
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How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
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It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
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If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.
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I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
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And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.
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If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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