At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.

For what wears out the life of mortal men?
'Tis that from change to change their being rolls:
'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of the strongest souls,
And numb the elastic powers.
Till having us'd our nerves with bliss and teen,
And tir'd upon a thousand schemes our wit,
To the just-pausing Genius we remit
Our worn out life, and are — what we have been.

- The Scholar Gipsy

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Life, that can shower you with so much slendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

No occupation is more tiresome or depressing than that of killing time. It is the cause of lifeweariness, the punishment the soul inflicts upon itself when reduced to passiveness and servitude.

Time wears out bodies, renews hopes, brings death nearer and takes away aspirations. Whoever gets anything from the world lives in anxiety for holding it and whoever loses anything passes his days grieving over the loss.

lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired

Human contact wears things out with disheartening slowness.

The world grows old,
and growing old, withers away.

When the mind of man ceases to thrust outward, it begins to contract and wither.

No matter what we are, and what we sing,
Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel

Life is withering away
like a candle that is melting down.

You cannot imagine how wearisome existence grows, alone and immortal.

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,—the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.