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
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
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
Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On the Suffering of the World,", Essays and Aphorisms
Description is always a bore, both to the describer and to the describee.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Home Letters
Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.
ANDREW DAVIDSON
The Gargoyle
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
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
JOHN BERGER
A Fortunate Man
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
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
Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering -- a hell of boredom.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the earth, the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve; and the latter, bored in their turn in paradise, ate the forbidden fruit. God became bored with them and drove them out of Eden.
ALBERTO MORAVIA
La Noia
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
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Antichrist
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