Top 100 Boredom's Quotes
#1. Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#2. As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
Henry Adams
#3. In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom.
Stephen King
#4. There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
Roger Ebert
#5. Listen deeply. Meditate on that which is arising. Even if it's boredom or difficulty or maybe a feeling of being stuck, that in itself can be the work for your practice.
Rodney Yee
#6. Being a [bank] director is like being a pilot of an aircraft - it's years of boredom and seconds of terror.
Moira Johnston
#7. The more time you have to do things, the less you are able to get done.
Joyce Rachelle
#8. Waiting for a book to be published is like having a baby. It would be nine months before we heard the patter of tiny pages trotting through the letter box, and the bookcase shuffled it's shelves in boredom and I was a martyr to morning sickness.
Deric Longden
#9. Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'
Gore Vidal
#10. She's extremely un-suburban and charismatic and has this way of making you feel you're the only thing standing between her and death due to boredom.
Susan Juby
#11. I've never been someone who's very prone to boredom. I don't know, boredom seems like something you should grow out of at about 15 or 16. There's so much that needs to be done.
Jason Isbell
#12. Shabelsky: I'd go into the flames of hell, into the jaws of the crocodile, just so as not to stay here. I am bored.
I've become dulled from boredom. I've got on everyone's nerves. You leave me at home so she isn't bored alone, but I've made her life hell, I've eaten her up!
Anton Chekhov
#13. The desktop held a patina of hieroglyphs representing years of student boredom - names and initials gouged into the wood, blackened by grime and pencil, shellacked over, then cobwebbed again with another generation's imprint.
Chris Offutt
#14. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
Hanya Yanagihara
#15. For all the boredom the straight life brings, it's not too bad.
Gus Van Sant
#16. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
David Foster Wallace
#17. The search for identity in one's youth is a journey of alternate boredom and agony interrupted by flash of joy.
Victoria Clayton
#18. Boredom is the keynote of poverty ... it's dark brown sameness.
Moss Hart
#19. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
Roland Barthes
#20. Work is the world's easiest escape from boredom and the only surefire road to success.
Marabel Morgan
#21. Learning to combat boredom is a lesson in and of itself and it's one you don't have to drive your kid anywhere for them to learn.
Jenny Lawson
#22. If you want to cure boredom, be curious. If you're curious, nothing is a chore; it's automatic - you want to study. Cultivate curiosity, and life becomes an unending study of joy.
Tony Robbins
#23. The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
T. S. Eliot
#24. That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Maria Semple
#25. Essentially, boredom is centered upon time, on the horror of time, on the fear of time, the disclosure of time, the awareness of time. Those who are not aware of time passing do not get bored. It's not the time that passes, it's the time that doesn't pass.
Emil Cioran
#26. Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.
Julia Cameron
#27. Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
Eugene Ionesco
#28. I can never think of the time I spend idling in railway stations as lost; it's a waiting liberated from the three temporal vices of regret, anticipation or boredom, the weak echo of that bliss spent between lifetimes.
Eric Morecambe
#29. It's sad to see how many relationships start as just a distraction from boredom, a cover up so they don't have to ever deal with the true pain below
Evan Sutter
#31. It's precisely in those moments when I don't know what to do, boredom drives one to try a host of possibilities to either get somewhere or not get anywhere.
Anish Kapoor
#32. It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.
Jack Kevorkian
#33. I don't think suicide is so terrible. Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.
Lina Wertmuller
#34. Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.
Jean Dubuffet
#35. Training and learning a new skill is all about repetition. With this in mind be careful not to get repetitive to the point of boredom. A coach's challenge is to find ways of doing similar skills differently
Catherine Cox
#36. Be politically correct, but please don't bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that's the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation.
Karl Lagerfeld
#37. - fear comes only when you don't have faith in the outcome. And boredom comes only when you believe there's nothing new worth learning. I simply can't understand how any of that will occur today.
Trish Mercer
#38. What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!
Anton Chekhov
#39. Rain's pouring and it's too cold.
All people bored and I even accord
What to do but spell a tale told:
So once upon a time a land in the shore...
Ana Claudia Antunes
#40. Anyone can be bored or unfulfilled at virtually any job. How one chooses to respond to boredom is key. Most women are resourceful: when faced with boredom, they find a way out. That's an essential skill. Those who don't have it will suffer, to be sure, but that is not society's problem.
Suzanne Venker
#41. I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
Fernando Pessoa
#42. Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
Lewis Cass
#43. There's too much down time making movies. That leads to boredom. And that leads to trouble.
Jeremy Renner
#44. Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.
John Cleese
#45. 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
#46. All families had started off in some mysterious waay: to repopulate the earth, or by accident, or by force, or out of boredom; and it's all a mystery what each will become.
Yuri Herrera
#47. A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#49. You have to be the right type for calm waters. For some, dead calm is inner peace, for others it's the doldrums.
Daniel Glattauer
#50. If you want to live in 'white world,' if you want to experience the stultifying boredom and penetrating ennui that homogeneity can bring, you can go to Canada any day of the year. It's an entire country named Doug.
Greg Proops
#51. I think there is something beautiful in reveling in sadness. The proof is how beautiful sad songs can be. So I don't think being sad is to be avoided. It's apathy and boredom you want to avoid. But feeling anything is good, I think. Maybe that's sadistic of me.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#52. Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.
Julian Barnes
#53. I am never bored; to be bored is an insult to one's self.
Jules Renard
#54. There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.
Dustin Hoffman
#55. Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don't be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There's reason behind that idiom. It'll kill you sure enough.
Adam Haslett
#56. I was anxious, but also eager to be back in that Boy's Own world where every emotion was heightened, where even boredom had an edge. This
Clar Ni Chonghaile
#57. If you're afraid to take risks in anything in life, it's just boredom.
Clint Eastwood
#58. Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it's because we are easily bored.
Neil Gaiman
#59. Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world's in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#60. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It's very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
Robert M. Pirsig
#61. There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.
Viggo Mortensen
#62. 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
#63. Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.
Bohumil Hrabal
#64. People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home.
Jonathan Raban
#65. Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.
Larry Niven
#66. Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.
Rona Jaffe
#67. I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom ... " & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.
David Mitchell
#68. When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.
Dylan Moran
#69. Learning lines is hard for me because I have the attention span of a six year old. That's why being on planes all the time is so useful - I'm forced to learn out of boredom.
Eddie Redmayne
#70. The clue's always, always, buried deep in the boredom ...
Where do you feel most bored? Go there.
Scarlett Thomas
#71. What the jogger's face shows is not boredom but contemplation, which Thomas Aquinas described as man's highest activity save one - contemplation plus putting the fruits of that contemplation into action.
George Sheehan
#73. If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do - it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind's normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficits.
Deborah Blum
#74. She'd discovered the beginnings of her adult person, her preference for lucidity, prudence, responsibility, and restraint. Tranquility could be eked from boredom, results from hard work.
V.S. Kemanis
#76. No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.
Ian McEwan
#77. If wishes were prey, we'd eat like lions come leaf-bare. But we'd die of boredom! You know that's not what the life of the Clans is like. The warrior code guides us through the dark times, the cold and the hunger. And the good times seem all the sweeter for it. Have faith, Bluestar. We'll survive.
Erin Hunter
#78. Hunch is your brain's way of taking a shortcut to the truth.'
'In small towns news travel at the speed of boredom'.
Carlos Luiz Zafon
#79. Believe me, there's nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.
Charlie Jane Anders
#80. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#81. Boredom is your mind and body's way of telling you you're not living up to your potential.
Hal Sparks
#82. She recognized the panic at even a moment's boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time.
Lorrie Moore
#83. It's all there-the boredom, the devotion, the horror and even the humor in an industrial war fought on a global scale that we'll never see again. Unit histories just do not get any better.
Barrett Tillman
#84. Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.
Javier Marias
#85. Then, cutting across it all like a stick through the sand, a child's voice wailed, an acute, high-pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg.
Zadie Smith
#86. I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.
Edward Gorey
#87. It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.
Nelson Shanks
#88. I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced.
George Orwell
#89. The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
Robert Anton Wilson
#90. I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.
Christopher Isherwood
#91. Boredom is not black licorice, Snicket," she said. "There's no reason to share it with me.
Lemony Snicket
#92. If love of money is the root of all evil, then having money is the root of all boredom. When you can have everything, you find there's nothing you really want. When you can do anything, you find there's nothing you really care to do. You become lazy. Life feels like a boulder you don't want to lift.
Neal Shusterman
#93. I just wish Mary Elizabeth would ask me questions other than What's up?
Stephen Chbosky
#94. We're dying of boredom, Corporal, that's the problem.' [Blend]
'If boredom was fatal there wouldn't be a soldier alive on this whole world, Blend.' [Picker]
Stephen Erickson
#95. It's boredom. No other reason than that.
Brad Pitt
#96. Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
Tom Hodgkinson
#97. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
Richard Bach
#98. I truly believe that the boredom of illness is parlous to one's health
Tyne O'Connell
#99. Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
Anton Chekhov
#100. One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.
Josephine Tey
