quotations about boredom
Work banishes those three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty.
VOLTAIRE
Candide
Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.
RUMI
attributed, Oh My Beloved!: Seven Lessons in Sacred Relationship
Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
SUSAN ERTZ
Anger in the Sky
Doing anything when you're bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing.
AIDAN CHAMBERS
This Is All
I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
EMILE ZOLA
The Ladies' Paradise
I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
MARIA SEMPLE
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Ennui, the demon, waited at the threshold of his noiseless refuge, and drove away the stirring hopes and elivening expectations, which form the better part of life.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Lodore
Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Antichrist
Life is never boring but some people choose to be bored. The concept of boredom entails an inability to use up present moments in a personally fulfilling way. Boredom is a choice; something you visit upon yourself, and it is another of those self-defeating items that you can eliminate from your life.
WAYNE W. DYER
Your Erroneous Zones
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!
ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall
Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On the Suffering of the World,", Essays and Aphorisms
Boredom is what you fight. Constant, ever-present boredom. So you learn to look forward to small things. Sunlight glimpsed through a cloud, an extra piece of pie or candy, good thread to sew your blouse, a ribbon to wear in your hair.
VALERIE W. WESLEY
Playing My Mother's Blues
Description is always a bore, both to the describer and to the describee.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Home Letters
Dying of boredom
I'll try it all
It looks and feels great but look at what it's doing to you
But that's ok look at how it feels
DEFTONES
"Lhabia"
Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld
I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.
ERICH FROMM
Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
I think what we call the dulness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could any one find an intense interest in life? And many do.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires -- boredom.
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.
PAUL GOODMAN
Growing Up Absurd