#bore

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#bore #bores #contradict #great #himself

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#catholicism #christianity #jesus-shock #philosophy #sloth

Maybe he just looks good compared to the bores he's running against. ↗

— Ed Koch

#bores #compared #good #just #looks

If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#bored #brink #drive #get #i

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis. ↗

— Karl Kraus

#called #disease #morality #primary #secondary

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about. ↗

— Louis Kronenberger

#bores #boring #detail #educated #far

The band's never taken a year off. Last August we decided to take one, and three months in I was bored to tears. ↗

— Steven Tyler

#band #bored #decided #i #last

I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting. ↗

— Jackie Weaver

#because #been #bored #come #doing

I'm getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s. ↗

— Wim Wenders

#been #bored #cinema #division #early