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boredom quotes

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“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
“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
“Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.” Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Is not life a hundred times too short for us—to bore ourselves?” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen. ” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
“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
“Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“once I'd learned the trick of remembering things, I never had a moment's boredom.” Albert Camus, The Stranger
“Kind? . . . How boring that would be. I aspire to be wicked.” George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.” William Shakespeare, Othello
“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
“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
“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
“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“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
“I wished there was some way to explain how very uninterested I was in a normal human life.” Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
“Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death.” Albert Camus, The Fall
“I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“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
“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
“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
“I’m going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.” Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“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
“Thus its life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people’s.” Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
“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
“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

Related topics

life music change interest time future listening death women success pleasure normality reality happiness marriage men pain fear suffering memory

Related authors

Oscar Wilde (4)
Bertrand Russell (3)
Albert Camus (3)
Frank Zappa (3)
Chuck Palahniuk (3)
Arthur Schopenhauer (2)
Stephen King (2)
Edith Wharton (2)
Victor Hugo (1)
George Bernard Shaw (1)
Ambrose Bierce (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
Haruki Murakami (1)
Mark Twain (1)
William Shakespeare (1)
George R. R. Martin (1)
Jane Austen (1)
Neil Gaiman (1)
Marilyn Monroe (1)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (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)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1)
Beyond Good and Evil (1)
Studies in Pessimism (1)
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1)
The Plague (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)
The World as Will and Representation (1)
The Brothers Karamazov (1)
Man and Superman (1)
The Catcher in the Rye (1)
Othello (1)
The Fall (1)
Invisible Monsters (1)
My Story (1)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1)