quotations about boredom
Boredom is ... a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Conquest of Happiness
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.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Survivor
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
A man would die, though he were neither valiant, nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft, over and over.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Death", The Essays or Counsels
Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.
ANDREW DAVIDSON
The Gargoyle
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
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
If you didn't care what happened to me,
and i didn't care for you,
we would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain,
occasionally glancing up through the rain
wondering which of the buggers to blame
and watching for pigs on the wing.
PINK FLOYD
"Pigs on the Wing, Part 1"
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
JOHN BERGER
A Fortunate Man
Boredom is simply romanticism with a morning-after thirst.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
Average Jones
Boredom is the fear of self.
COMTESSE DIANE
attributed, Words from the Wise: Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said
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.
MOSS HART
Act One
Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.
JEREMY CLARKSON
The World According to Clarkson
Boredom's a pastime that one soon acquired
Where you get to the stage, where you're not even tired
Kicking your heels 'til the time comes around
To pick up your bags and head out of town
ELTON JOHN
"Holiday Inn"
A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
ARTHUR C. CLARK
Childhood's End
Boredom is a powerful incentive to come up with bad ideas.
JONAH GOLDBERG
"Free-Market Boring ... Losing Consciousness", National Review, January 24, 2001
The tendency is to blame boredom on the environment. "This town is really dull" or "What a boring speaker." The particular town or speaker is never dull, it is you experiencing the boredom, and you can eliminate it by doing something else with your mind or energy at that moment.
WAYNE W. DYER
Your Erroneous Zones
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
GUY DEBORD
The Incomplete Works of the Situationist International
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague