B. C. Forbes Quotes

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

If you do the same thing too often, it gets to be the only thing you can do.

There is no course of life so weak and sotish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

I'm afraid of habit patterns...It would be too much of a routine if you had to establish definite ways of getting through things. You'd get very bored.

It isnot good enough tospend time and ink indescribing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut, we all know them so well.

If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.

The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him.

When you do not change up a lot, people may know you a lot better than they should.

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected. The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.

Monotony reveals our limitations.

After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before.

I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.

When you do a TV show, there's always the fear that it will become tired and you'll know exactly what's going to happen.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs?

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

The future is a monotonous instrument

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.

Chyerti—that’s us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.

Predictability can lead to failure.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

Consistency is the horror of the world.