Quotes About Boredom

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.

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.

If you love music and it requires hours of practice that can be boring, you can survive the boredom, you're not going to love it but you can survive the boredom because you're connected to something that excites you.

I’ve seen excitement, and I’ve seen boredom. And boredom was best.

Boredom is a blessing when it leads you to wisdom. And boredom is a curse when it leads you to frustration and depression.

I think there is something beautiful in reveling in sadness. The proof is how beautiful sad songs can be. So I don’t think being sad is to be avoided. It’s apathy and boredom you want to avoid. But feeling anything is good, I think. Maybe that’s sadistic of me.

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.

He managed to convey indifference, contempt, and boredom in the one word.

Who has that absolute trust, to fling yourself into mortality, to let it do with you as it will, with all the permutations and possibilities of as it will, be it horror or ecstasy or boredom?

The boredom occasioned by too much restraint is always preferable to that produced by an uncontrolled enthusiasm for a pointless variety.

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.

I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.

Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

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.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and adressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. [...] The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

German writings attain popularity through a great name, or through personalities, or through good connections, or through effort,or through moderate immorality, or through accomplished incomprehensibility, or through harmonious platitude, or through versatile boredom, or through constant striving after the absolute.

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.

Boredom is the biggest problem. The same position. Same day of the week. It becomes boring when you don't bring any added flowers home.

The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.

Being a [bank] director is like being a pilot of an aircraft - it's years of boredom and seconds of terror.

It's boredom. No other reason than that.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

A scholar knows no boredom.

He regards boredom, I observe, as the One and Mighty Enemy of his soul. And will succeed in conquering it, I am sure—if he survives the experience.

For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.

The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.

The enemy of good television is boredom and predictability.

It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their masters is one of perpetual boredom.

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.

A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That's enlarging. I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.

BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

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.

It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their master is one of perpetual confident boredom. All they betray of the hidden life is by means of symbol; if it were not for the recurring evidence of murder – the disemboweled rabbits, the headless flickers, the torn squirrels – we should forever imagine our cats to be simple pets whose highest ambition is to sleep in the best soft chair, whose worst crime is to sharpen their claws on carpeting.

Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

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

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

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.

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

Escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.