Quotes About Boredom

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.

When you were a child, where boredom could actually get to be painful. Sociopaths experience that kind of pain in boredom. And so to be alone, to have nobody to play the game with, can be painful. It's not exactly fear, it's a kind of pain.

Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine ― that is, activity ― which could solve it, is seen as odious. Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw. Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on. Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most unmanning. Eventually, it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing ― a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.

Passions are less mischievous than boredom, for passions tend to diminish and boredom increase.

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.

It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings.

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.

...boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.

Boredom has always been a problem.

We try to 'self-medicate' ourselves against boredom with mobile phones in any given moment of free time.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Only in sex the noise sometimes stops. I say "sometimes". If you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic and the mind goes on its own. Then sex also is a boredom.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

Even boredom has its crises.

All illegal narcotics are medicinal. Boredom is a disease worse than cancer. Drugs cure it, with little or no side effects if used as directed. Life's temporary for a reason, it gets boring after awhile. You should be inventing new drugs is what you should be doing! Newer, crazier drugs... and more holes, that's what you ladies need!

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.

Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right. ~Amber

Music is a place to take refuge. It's a sanctuary from mediocrity and boredom. It's innocent and it's a place you can lose yourself in thoughts, memories and intricacies.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of it's complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

The one sure means of dealing with boredom is to care for someone else, to do something kind and good.

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.

It is to our lack of proper content ("notre manque de contenu propre:;», Fr.), of our inner emptiness that we need occupations and distractions, otherwise ("faute de quoi", Fr.) we experience boredom, which is nothing elses than the feeling of unease that take hold of us when our spirit is not absorbed by the mirages of life.

Boredom is the keynote of poverty — of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with — for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine. To be able to break out of its dark brown sameness.

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

I don't like being in one place too long. Five days just about does it for me because I have a very low threshold for boredom.

Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.

I wanted to get that sense of peace and even boredom that comes with long familiarity.

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

If the world is a progressively realized community of interpretation, then either quadruplictity will drink procrastination or, provided that the nothing negates, boredom will ensue seldom more often than frequently.

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.

The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.

There's something about trying to know when you really need to protect yourself, or else you're not going to get anything done, and sometimes to be really uncomfortable or agitated or annoyed or bored. Boredom is so important.

This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured - the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart - the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but has the excuse of a sister to support - the businessman who hated his business - the worker who hated his work - the intellectual who hated everybody - all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.

The presidency has many problems, but boredom is the least of them.

Clarice has a curious chemical reaction to boredom and the result can be similar to dynamite in the hands of a lunatic.

Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?

Discussing how old you are is the temple of boredom.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.