Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Boredom can be used as a means to exert control over individuals, creating a state of stagnation that is accompanied by fear and despair.
In this quote, Saul Bellow explores the darker aspects of boredom, suggesting that it is not merely an absence of activity, but a tool wielded by those in power to enforce compliance and maintain social order. This deep-seated boredom intertwines with feelings of anguish and existential dread, highlighting how a lack of engagement can lead to greater issues of control, fear, and even mortality.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about governmental authority, one might say, 'As Saul Bellow stated, boredom is an instrument of social control, showing how power can manipulate society.'
More from Saul Bellow
All quotes →When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?
I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Similar quotes
We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.
Most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don't blame them. It's superstition: If you give assistance to the family in need... if you throw salt over your shoulder... if you don't step on the cracks, then maybe you'll be immune. Maybe you'll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you.
Western people ask me whether it is a paradox that I am King but support democracy. I have to tell them that in Thailand, the King is the guarantor of democracy.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd.