Boredom Quotes

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.

~ Ada Calhoun

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!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.

~ Shannon L. Alder

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.

~ Joanna Walsh

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.

~ Arkady Strugatsky

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.

~ John Updike

...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom.

~ Criss Jami

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”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

~ Émile Zola

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...

~ Hermann Hesse

At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engagement and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defience.

~ Esther Perel

All suffer and none should have to. But why not? If suffering makes life seem more real or more abstract, both circumstances are infinitely more bearable than the disturbing reality of mundane work-to-live-then-die-bored life.

~ Moonshine Noire

...few truly understood how disheartening it was to be cut off from worlds so strange and distant they remained to us fantasies rather than distant realities, too surreal and foreign to be touched. Their minds were fixated on what they knew to be real, unable to create the atmospheres of the nebulous realms that lay just beyond our reach, just beyond the dimming horizon, our celestial limits.

~ Moonshine Noire

Time' is the illusional domain occupied by the state of boredom. 'Space' is the infinite - reality - experienced by the state of higher creative consciousness. Choose wisely.

~ T.f. Hodge

Reality can be very boring.

~ Amy Neftzger

Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Boredom is a positive attitude's enemy.

~ Lindsey Rietzsch

Boredom is the Devil's delight.

~ Lindsey Rietzsch

An entrepreneur is born, when a person has more reasons to drive his dreams against his excuses.

~ Sukant Ratnakar

...I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.

~ Christopher Isherwood

Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Before you get bored of yourself try creativity in your life.

~ Amit Kalantri

Never believe a friend who offered you his friendship just because he was getting bored.

~ Amit Kalantri

People fear nothing as much as boredom and they will do unimaginable things to make it go away.

~ Amit Kalantri

Be bold, don't be boring.

~ Amit Kalantri

A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.

~ Bertrand Russell

Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

As a subconscious attempt to add meaning or purpose to their life: The unemployed pray for a job, the retired pray for grandchildren.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We consume so we never have to answer the hard questions. When we are bored we eat. When we are lonely we watch a movie, read the newspaper, jump on social media. Each time we do we cover up our real emotions and keep throwing another layer of confusion and anxiety on top, making it almost impossible to dig ourselves out of the hole, or at least see which way is up.

~ Evan Sutter

It’s sad to see how many relationships start as just a distraction from boredom, a cover up so they don’t have to ever deal with the true pain below

~ Evan Sutter

Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity.

~ Norman Doidge

Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.

~ Elizabeth I

We want not only life but an intense awareness of being alive. The large tendency of our mechanical and standardized civilization is to blunt that awareness by surrounding us with ideas and forms that require the lowest degree of consciousness. One lives in it less by reflection than by reflex. The effect of the uniform blows with which the environment strikes us is to make us insensitive to any but the most violent stimuli; two-thirds of life ceases to exist for us because the valves of attention require cataclysmic upheavals before they will open. Lacking the capacity to be excited by any but the most gross and violent stimuli, we spend our lives in a frantic race with boredom.

~ Denham Sutcliffe

It is the lot of mankind to feel not only insecure but also bored. To combat that experience, people long to be passively entertained, which requires less effort than assuming responsibility for self-improvement.

~ Thomas Szasz

I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.

~ Slavoj Žižek

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

~ Saul Steinberg