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Boredom Quotes

Quotes tagged as "boredom" Showing 91-120 of 758
Bruno Schulz
“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

Gustave Flaubert
“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

Elizabeth I
“Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.”
Queen Elizabeth I of England

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

“I always think boredom is to some extent the fault of the bored.”
Kate Ross, Cut to the Quick

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

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

Ally Carter
“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

Robert McKee
“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

J.G. Ballard
“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

Alexander McCall Smith
“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

Yvan Goll
“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

Fyodor Dostoevsky
“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

Douglas Adams
“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

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

Charles Bukowski
“Life wore a man out, wore a man thin.
Tomorrow would be a better day.”
Charles Bukowski, Pulp

“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

André Breton
“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

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

Jeremy Clarkson
“I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then� and then what?
By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again.
I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.”
Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson
“I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.”
Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

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

Peter Kreeft
“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

Georges Bataille
“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

Arnold Bennett
“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

Seneca
“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