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boredom quotes

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“Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.” Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
“Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.” Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.” Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Boredom is therefore 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
“Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.” David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.” Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
“I wished there was some way to explain how very uninterested I was in a normal human life.” Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” Albert Camus, The Plague
“To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.” Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
“If I die prematurely, at any rate I shall be saved from being bored by my own success.” Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
“Thus its life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen. ” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.” Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“the dance floor is packed with people, most of them young, most of them bored, trying to look turned on.” Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Why live in real life? It's better to dream. One can dream the most delightful things, but real life is a bore.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“Is not life a hundred times too short for us—to bore ourselves?” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so—because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity...” Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
“Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.” Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
“Kind? . . . How boring that would be. I aspire to be wicked.” George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?” George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
“Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
“I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“So I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something.” J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything… Was boredom unknown to them?” Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
“once I'd learned the trick of remembering things, I never had a moment's boredom.” Albert Camus, The Stranger
“Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.” William Shakespeare, Othello
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
“If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mother, your Dad, your priest, to some guy on television, to any of the people telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
“The more boring the child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.” Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
“If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves” Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
“Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
“I’m going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.” Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“I have noticed since that men usually leave married women alone, and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women. Men are always ready to respect anything that bores them.” Marilyn Monroe, My Story
“Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death.” Albert Camus, The Fall
“But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.” Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Related topics

life time success death women change future listening pleasure interest normality beauty happiness God education men fear heart reality pain

Related authors

Oscar Wilde (4)
Albert Camus (3)
Chuck Palahniuk (3)
Bertrand Russell (3)
Frank Zappa (3)
Stephen King (2)
Arthur Schopenhauer (2)
Edith Wharton (2)
William Shakespeare (1)
Jane Austen (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
George R. R. Martin (1)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1)
Haruki Murakami (1)
Mark Twain (1)
Neil Gaiman (1)
Victor Hugo (1)
J. D. Salinger (1)
George Bernard Shaw (1)
Samuel Butler (1)

Related sources

The Conquest of Happiness (3)
The Real Frank Zappa Book (3)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (2)
The Age of Innocence (2)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2)
Man and Superman (1)
The Brothers Karamazov (1)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1)
The Plague (1)
The Fall (1)
The Catcher in the Rye (1)
Beyond Good and Evil (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)
Madame Bovary (1)
Invisible Monsters (1)
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1)
Twilight (1)
Othello (1)
My Story (1)
Mansfield Park (1)