A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith
American - Economist
October 15, 1908 - April 29, 2006

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

Geoff Dyer

It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.

Max Beerbohm

It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

H. L. Mencken

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Boris Pasternak

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. Boredom sets into boring minds. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler

For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment. ... Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society).

Merold Westphal

I first think of intelligence. You need it for surviving in Italy because Italy is so pompous.

Francesco Clemente

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for decent behavior seems to vary directly with his perception of others as individual humans with human motives and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarism seems related to his perception of an adversary in abstract terms, as the embodiment, that is, of some evil design or ideology.

J. William Fulbright

I've never been someone who's very prone to boredom. I don't know, boredom seems like something you should grow out of at about 15 or 16. There's so much that needs to be done.

Jason Isbell

Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.

Bertrand Russell

One's capacity for friendship, which can be developed, is basic to one's capacity for happiness.

Maxwell Maltz

The obvious choice isn't always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don't stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don't feel guilty about keeping it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

Philip Roth

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

A man is most happy when he is most perfect, and he is most perfect when all his faculties are proportionately and harmoniously developed. Thus developed, nature and art and society supply him with a thousand sources of enjoyment.

Joseph P. Bradley

What would be better, that people build big houses thinking that they'll make capital gains or that they send their children to medical school and they do research on curing diseases? When you put it that way, it seems obvious. There has developed a sense of personal worth that's tied to one's house.

Robert J. Shiller

A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

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