Quotes about boredom
Louis C.K. -
I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.
Terry Pratchett - Hogfather
HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)
Susan Ertz -
... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Michel Houellebecq -
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Sherman Alexie - Flight
What kind of life can you have in a house without books?
David Foster Wallace -
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type
Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun
Boredom can be a lethal thing on a small island.
Evan Sutter - Solitude: How Doing Nothing Can Change the World
We all need a technological detox; we need to throw away our phones and computers instead of using them as our pseudo-defence system for anything that comes our way. We need to be bored and not have anything to use to shield the boredom away from us. We need to be lonely and see what it is we really feel when we are. If we continue to distract ourselves so we never have to face the realities in front of us, when the time comes and you are faced with something bigger than what your phone, food, o
Benjamin J. Carey - Barefoot in November
At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.
Andy Warhol -
Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.
Auliq Ice -
Happiness changes the way you see the world.
Auliq Ice -
This life-enhancing, happiness-inducing miracle drug that does, in fact, ruthlessly kill its enemies—you’ve guessed it—is gratitude.
Edward Gorey -
I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Peter Kreeft - Jesus-Shock
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
Peter Kreeft - Jesus-Shock
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
Peter Kreeft - Jesus-Shock
Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.
Peter Kreeft - Jesus-Shock
The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.
Gena Showalter - The Darkest Night
What's this about?""Finally. Interest," was the only response."If this is one of your tricks..." Like the time Torin had ordered hundreds of blow-up dolls and placed them throughout the fortress, all because Paris had foolishly complained about the lack of female companionship in town. The plastic "ladies" had stared our from every corner, their wide eyes and let-me-suck-you mouths taunting everyone who passed them.Things like that happened when Torin was bored.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Being bored is the price we pay for not being insane.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
There is no such thing as a boring person when you are lonely or extremely bored.
Jack Kerouac -
Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone
Alexander McCall Smith - Chocolate
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Albert Camus - The Fall
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - The Use and Misuse of Children
Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.
Winston S. Churchill -
I'm bored with it all. - Last Words
Cyril Wong - Below: Absence: Poems
If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.
Will Advise - Nothing is here...
On building homes for fallen angels:When I was small - I sought a home,a place to go and rest my bones.Then founded something, of my own,I lived among the restless stones.If seeking leads you back to evil,what good is that, I asked a weevil.He said a home is what you make,it can't be real, if it is fake...And if you wait instead of seek,will you find love, or something bleak?I know (myself) for I have found,a beauty, hidden – in a sound.Waiting is boring.And so is exploring.A smile is sometimes
Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?
This ignorance of what to do with time is the number one reason why people get bored so easily when alone with nothing to do.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
NOT UNTIL I MET YOUNot until I felt your sunshine,Did I realize that I had been in the shade.Not until I saw all your colors,Did I realize that mine had faded.Not until I heard your dreams,Did I realize that I was still sleeping.And not until I experienced my life with you,Did I realize that I was barelyBreathing.
Shannon L. Alder -
When a man plays with your heart it is for one of two reasons: He knows he can or he is undecided.
Isaac Asimov -
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
Marie Joséphine de Suin -
Boredom is the fear of self.
John Keats -
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
Mark Batterson - All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
We all want to spend eternity with God. We just don't want to spend time with Him. We stand and stare from a distance, satisfied with superficiality. We Facebook more than we seek His face. We text more than we study The Text. And our eyes aren't fixed on Jesus. They're fixed on our iPhones and iPads - emphasis on "i." Then we wonder why God feels so distant. It's because we're hugging the rim. We wonder why we're bored with our faith. It's because we're holding out.We want joy without sacrifice
Ally Carter - Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover
There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear..." he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge.
Ally Carter - Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover
There are 6 reasons that a person does anything: Love, faith, greed, boredom, fear... revenge.
Shannon L. Alder -
Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.
Bessel A. van der Kolk - and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most inti
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
Ada Calhoun - Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give
The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.
Mehmet Murat ildan -
To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to imagine a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!
Malcolm de Chazal -
The glance embroiders in joy, knits in pain, and sews in boredom.When indifferent, the eye takes stills, when interested, movies.Laughter is regional: a smile extends over the whole face.
Erik Pevernagie -
Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered : humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. (“Buying now, dying later”)
John Updike - Rabbit at Rest
TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
Criss Jami - Healology
The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom.
Arkady Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
How can I give up stalking when I have a family to feed? Get a job? I don't want to work for you, your work makes me puke, do you understand? This is the way I figure it: if a man works with you, he is always working for one of you, he is a slave and nothing else. And I always wanted to be myself, on my own, so that I could spit at you all, at your boredom and despair.
Joanna Walsh - Vertigo
We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apart from ours, they are desperate for any other. They will even sing to themselves, sometimes. The boy whistles. He makes his voice croak. He sings the same thing again, but breathing in. A bird echoes the first notes of Vivaldi.
Alice Munro -
Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?
Voltaire - Candide
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
Iwan Goll -
Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been e
Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard
We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.
U.G. Krishnamurti - No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti
Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it
Jean Lorrain - Le Crime Des Riches (1905): Suivi de Paris Forain
The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.
Alison Weir - Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty.
Robert Walser - The Walk
One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
Dada Bhagwan -
Boredom is itself worry.
Dada Bhagwan -
To remain lying on thorns (kanta) is called boredom (kantado).
Bonnie MacBird - Art in the Blood
It is well known that in exchange for visionary powers, artists often suffer with extreme sensitivity and violent changeability of temperament. A philosophical crisis, or simply boredom of inactivity, could send [Holmes] spinning into a paralysed gloom from which [I] could not retrieve him.
Richelle Mead - The Golden Lily
Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Sign of the Four: By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Illustrated
My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
W.H. Auden - Lectures on Shakespeare
In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout — and the same is true of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sens
Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
The worst part of being a driver is that you have hours to yourself while waiting for your employer. You can spend this time chitchatting and scratching your groin. You can read murder and rape magazines. You can develop the chauffeur's habit it's a kind of yoga, really of putting a finger in your nose and letting your mind go blank for hours (they should call it the "bored driver's asana").
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott - Little Eve Edgarton
And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together—year after year—for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ball
Dada Bhagwan -
When Boredom comes, it is the time during which discovery is to be made. That is the time during which real effort (purushartha) can be made. But instead, people push it aside.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Conversations with Professor Y
"Fine! Fine! I'm listening...but it's not very interesting!... "Oh, that's what you think! that's what you think! but nothing is very interesting, dear Professor Y! jot this down! take some notes!" "What notes?" "Just write!...that if it weren't for wars, alcohol, blood pressure and cancer, the people in our atheistic Europe would soon be bored to death of life!
H.G. Wells - The Holy Terror
The world, I tell you, is bored -- bored now to the explosive pitch. It's bored by all this incessant war preparation. It is bored by aimless violence, now here, now there. It is tired of hatred politics. It's tired of fresh murders every day. It is not indignant, not excited; it is bored. Bored and baffled..."I don't believe a man begins to know anything of politics until he realises the immense menace of mental fatigue, of world-wide mass boredom. It accumulates. It makes the most frightful co
Nigel Cumberland - 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living
Do you enjoy your work? Are you happy to get out of bed each morning and dress for the office? If you answered ‘no’ to either of these questions, you are not alone. In a 2014 Conference Board survey, 52 per cent of Americans claimed to be unhappy at work and in a recent CIPD study 23 per cent of Britons claimed to be looking for a new job. In the same survey only about one-third claim to feel engaged with their work. You can see the effects of this in absence, stress and depression. In fact, you
Criss Jami - Killosophy
The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen - A Philosophy of Boredom
For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.
Emil M. Cioran - All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
Eugene B. Sledge - With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.
Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?
You are not told that while you try to eliminate your boredom by playing games and chatting on social media or watching movies and making unnecessary phone calls your life is diminishing into vanity.
Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?
I know so much pressure is on all of us to waste time and to just trivialize it. There is so much pressure on us to try to overcome boredom by spending time on frivolities.
Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?
There is so much pressure on us to try to overcome boredom by spending time on frivolities.
Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?
People who understands how to convert their time into useful products do not complain of boredom.
Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?
People who understand how to convert their time into useful products do not complain of boredom. They have too many important tasks to accomplish that they can hardly get bored.
Dorothy Parker -
I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.
Criss Jami - Electric Personality
The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.
E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
... an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.
Félix J. Palma - The Map of Time
Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism.
Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel
Boredom is fear's patience. Fear doesn't want to exaggerate. Only on occasion--and fear considers this very important--does it want to know how things stand with me.
Luke Rhinehart - The Dice Man
From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.
Steve Goodier -
Humor can make a serious difference. In the workplace, at home, in all areas of life – looking for a reason to laugh is necessary. A sense of humor helps us to get through the dull times, cope with the difficult times, enjoy the good times and manage the scary times.
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Some people are still alive only because they find being dead more boring than being alive.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.
Roland Barthes - The Pleasure of the Text
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person).
Anthon St. Maarten -
There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
What i'm trying to say is this. A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propogating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it.
Anton Chekhov - Ivanov
Ivanov: With a heavy head, with a slothful spirit, exhausted, overstretched, broken, without faith, without love, without a goal, I roam like a shadow among men and I don't know who I am, why I'm alive, what I want. And I now think that love is nonsense, that embraces are cloying, that there's no sense in work, that song and passionate speeches are vulgar and outmoded. And everywhere I take with me depression, chill boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion from life... I am destroyed, irretrievably!
Jonathan Franzen - Farther Away
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.