Boredom Quotes - Page 2

People these days can’t seem to tolerate one moment without entertainment!

I confess I found it somewhat insipid when I last went....it was all so prosy - so bonnety - so whisty and teacuppy - you see, the adjectives for it do not even exist, and I must invent them.

Jude Morgan

Kumiko and I would visit their home and have dinner with them twice a month with mechanical regularity. This was a truly loathsome experience, situated at the precise midpoint between a meaningless mortification of the flesh and brutal torture. Throughout the meal, I had the sense that their dining room table was as long as a railway station. They would be eating and talking about something way down at the other end, and I was too far away for them to see. This went on for a year, until Kumiko's father and I had a violent argument, after which we never saw each other again. The relief this gave me bordered on ecstasy. Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.

Haruki Murakami

Boredom is merely a symptom of an apathetic soul.

Tim

In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom.

Stephen King

One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.

Josephine Tey

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life

Frank O'Hara

Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.

H.W. Brands

When you are bored of the plains, the secret passages to the mountains suddenly appear out of nowhere before you!

Mehmet Murat ildan

What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

Alain de Botton

and now i am back in the grey world where it tastes like plastic, the monotony is buzzing through my jaws and the boredom is pulling my hair.

Anna Jae

I truly believe that the boredom of illness is parlous to one's health

Tyne O'Connell

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.

Helen Keller

It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.

Luke Rhinehart

Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.

Bohumil Hrabal

Darling, I'm so unutterably bored as to be a hazard

Tyne O'Connell

You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

Alastair Reynolds

She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.

D.H. Lawrence

Don't be afraid to let yourself get bored because some of the most amazing things are created through boredom.

Rachel Hamilton

Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.

Tom Hodgkinson

Boredom is restlessness of the soul. It is an internal message reminding you that you're better than the stagnancy you've settled for.

Steve Maraboli

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

Marcel Proust

Where have I been? she wondered. Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?For some time things had been going badly for her. She could cite nothing in particular as a problem; rather, it was as if life in general had a grudge against her. Things persisted in turning grey. Although at first she had revelled in the erudite seclusion of her job, in the protection against the vulgarities of the world that it offered, after five years she now felt that in some way it had aged her disproportionately, that she was as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding. When, very occasionally, she raised her eyes from the past and surveyed the present, it faded from her view and became as ungraspable as a mirage. Although she had discussed this with the Director, who had waved away her condition of mind as an occupational hazard, she was still not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived.

Marian Engel

I am terrified of being bored.

Marie Antoinette

But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.

Gustave Flaubert

It is not uncommon for fighters’ camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.

Norman Mailer

By dinnertime, Amanda had managed to pick off all of her red nail polish purely out of habit. She was disappointed and silently cursed at herself when she remembered not having anymore to put on. She stared at her fingernails for about twenty minutes for lack of something better to do.

Jason Medina

And besides, I couldn't stay at the party. It was too dangerous. I nearly died.""From what?""Boredom.

Jennifer Donnelly

Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness.

Henry Miller

Make a plan & Use the time when you're thinking about "what to do when your bored

Rabin Mahmud

There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as 'whole person conversation'—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness.

Sherry Turkle

Boredom is a form of evil; perhaps one of Kierkegaard's characters was more correct when he said, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Boredom is a preview of death, if not itself a form of death, and when trapped in prolonged boredom, even the most saintly of us will hope for, pray for, or even engineer relief, however demonic.

Fred B. Craddock

This is what a place like this does to you. It makes you put words in the beaks of chickens.

Danielle Paige

I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.

John Green

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.

Saul Bellow

Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine.

Charles Dickens

How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite.

Søren Kierkegaard

What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable.

Rick Moody

Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.‘It’s not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,’ Keep-on-Dancin’ asserted. ‘The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn’t so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they’re scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They’d do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don’t forget, it’s with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other.

Jacques Yonnet

When people say they're unemployed, bored, or have nothing to do, I sigh and think, "If only time were transferable.

Joyce Rachelle

—fear comes only when you don’t have faith in the outcome. And boredom comes only when you believe there’s nothing new worth learning. I simply can’t understand how any of that will occur today.

Trish Mercer

Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.

Arthur Schopenhauer

We're dying of boredom, Corporal, that's the problem.' [Blend] 'If boredom was fatal there wouldn't be a soldier alive on this whole world, Blend.' [Picker]

Stephen Erickson

But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me --and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.

Thomas Mann

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.

Alain de Botton

That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struffle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy.

Philip Connors

Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.

Hilary Spurling

Time,Crawling so slowly, numbing our minds,Boredom, lack of ambition, lost.Passion and it speeds along.The fire burns again.Time,Fast and filled.With passion, no matter how fast time flies away,I am content.Alive.

Avina Celeste

And allow me again to assure you that when you've got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won't find you have any time to get bored.

Aleister Crowley

All men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.

Søren Kierkegaard

She would not tell him the truth for some weeks, but she would eventually confess that she had left with him because the fear had gone out of her daily leaps. Her hours were filled with confident, minor feats and toothless dangers. She would not call it such, but Adam would later name it for her: it was boredom that had driven her from her mother’s side and a secure home.

Josiah Bancroft

The nature of the mind is to acquire, to absorb, is it not? Or rather the pattern it has created for itself is one of gathering in, and in that very activity the mind is preparing its own weariness, boredom. Interst, curiosity, is the beginning of acquisition, wich soon becomes boredom; and the urge to be free from boredom is another form of possession. So the mingd goes from boredom to interest to boredom again, til it is utterly weary; and these successive waves of interest and weariness are regarded as existence. "Commentaries on Living, Series II

Jiddhu Krsihnamurti

Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.

Joseph Brodsky

Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.

Javier Marías

He exhaled in disgust. “High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.

Katie Kennedy

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches. Imagine a modern American publisher confronted with the Old Testament as a new manuscript submitted to him for the first time. It is not difficult to think what his comments would be, for example, on the genealogies. 'My dear sir,' he would say, 'this chapter lacks pep; you can't expect your reader to be interested in a mere string of proper names of persons about whom you tell so little. You have begun your story, I admit, in fine style, and at first I was very favourably impressed, but you have altogether too much wish to tell it all. Pick out the highlights, take out the superfluous matter, and bring me back your manuscript when you have reduced it to a reasonable length.' So the modern publisher would speak, knowing the modern reader's fear of boredom.

Bertrand Russell

Just lay down on the beach, with nothing intellectual or constructive to do , other than soaking in the sun, and listening to the refreshing sounds of the water waves and admiring the smiles of the ́near and dear ́ ones that we love.

Tina Sequeira

All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.

K.W. Jeter

Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else in some other way, in some other world; weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.

Pessoa Fernando

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Boredom Quotes - Page 2

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