Boredom Quotes

“The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

“He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing - with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.”
― Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game

“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.”
― William Inge

“There are 6 reasons that a person does anything: Love, faith, greed, boredom, fear... revenge.”
― Ally Carter, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

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

“Boring is the right thought at the wrong time.”
― Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things

“Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together—year after year—for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom—or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room—waiting to be discovered!”
― Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, Little Eve Edgarton

“Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been erected to rationality in order to put something in place of the cross: the French Revolution named its goddess reason, the Russians named their Moloch work. But the machine called Europe is running idle: it fills stomachs with fake bread, builds artificial houses with iron paper, the products are bad, the pay meager, and at the end of the six holy work days is the unholy Sunday which one sleeps through out of fear of the great boredom which is infecting Europe. Sunday, the day of idleness, is nowadays a punishment for Christianity, the cities collapse into soulless ruins, nature is just a backdrop for dusty sports. Doing nothing out of principle, my dear, is nowadays the most violent form of revolt.”
― Iwan Goll

“Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Life wore a man out, wore a man thin.
Tomorrow would be a better day.”
― Charles Bukowski, Pulp: Charles Bukowski's Final Hardboiled Noir Comedy – Lady Death, Aliens, and the Absurd

“Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!”
― André Breton

“A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring.”
― Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom

“People who understands how to convert their time into useful products do not complain of boredom.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“When you feel bored, pump your adrenaline!”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“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, The Fight

“The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.”
― Georges Bataille

“In consequence, when the pleasures have been removed which busy people derive from their actual activities, the mind cannot endure the house, the solitude, the walls, and hates to observe its own isolation. From this arises that boredom and self-dissatisfaction, that turmoil of a restless mind and gloomy and grudging endurance of our leisure, especially when we are ashamed to admit the reasons for it and our sense of shame drives the agony inward, and our desires are trapped in narrow bounds without escape and stifle themselves. From this arise melancholy and mourning and a thousand vacillations of a wavering mind, buoyed up by the birth of hope and sickened by the death of it. From this arises the state of mind of those who loathe their own leisure and complain that they have nothing to do, and the bitterest envy at the promotion of others. For unproductive idleness nurtures malice, and because they themselves could not prosper they want everyone else to be ruined. Then from this dislike of others' success and despair of their own, their minds become enraged against fortune, complain about the times, retreat into obscurity, and brood over their own sufferings until they become sick and tired of themselves.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Happiness changes the way you see the world.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Boredom slays more of existence than war.”
― Norman Mailer