Top 100 Dull Quotes
#1. What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.
Hunter S. Thompson
#2. Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start
Horace
#3. Whether one is twenty, forty, or sixty; whether one has succeeded, failed or just muddled along; whether yesterday was full of sun or storm, or one of those dull days with no weather at all, life begins each morning!
Leigh Mitchell Hodges
#4. Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.
Conor Oberst
#5. The only sounds here were lazy, ponderous, gentle sounds. A bee hung low in the warm afternoon haze, and he watched it unafraid, listened to the dull electric razor sound of its wings cutting the air. Birds sang sweet and unseen, and a hundred eyes watched him from the dark.
Michael Montoure
#6. I learn the whole time. I think it would be dull if I thought I was going to work and wouldn't find something new. We always learn.
Michael Caine
#7. Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.
Joe Hill
#8. the sorrow she carried around that made her smile come a second too late and made her ears grow dull so that her children would have to call her three or four times before they could get her attention.
Marisa Silver
#9. Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
Gordon Graham
#10. Life is too short to spend it being angry, bored, or dull.
Barbara Johnson
#11. Patience, thought Milligan, that word was invented by dull buggers who couldn't think quick enough.
Spike Milligan
#12. Were I to write what I know, the book would be too sensational to print, but were I to write what I think proper, it would be too dull to read.
Ina Coolbrith
#13. Now, my intention was to drink just enough to dull the senses, but intentions should never be mixed with alcohol.
Kirt J. Boyd
#14. Imagine how dull life would be if variables assessed for admission to a graduate program really did predict who would succeed and who would fall. Life would be intolerable - no hope, no challenge
Robyn Dawes
#15. The significant, life-forming times are the dull, in-between times.
Jan Karon
#16. Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.
J. Paul Getty
#17. I always think of books as being like people. Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don't have to seek them out and spend time with them.
Orson Scott Card
#18. Art thrives on a difference of opinion. My treasure is your junk, sort of thing. Life would be dull if we all agreed.
Robert Genn
#19. There are some days when you seem to have got to the end of all the things that could ever possibly happen to you, and you feel you will spend all the rest of your life doing dull things just the same way.
E. Nesbit
#20. You cannot command love, Lady, only beauty or lust does that. Do you want the world to be fair? Then just imagine a world with no kings, no queens, no lords, no passion and no magic. You would want to live in such a dull world?
Bernard Cornwell
#21. I would rather spend an hour among the notorious than two minutes with the dull.
Francine Mathews
#22. All originality and no plagiarism makes for dull preaching.
Charles Spurgeon
#23. In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
John Buchan
#24. My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain'
a physical pain, as he used to say
when he was with people who cared only for small talk.
Pyotr Kropotkin
#25. I have learned how to be a lady. It's just so dull I can't stick with it.
Shari L. Tapscott
#26. If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.
John Buchan
#27. I was so tired that I was nothing but my body: the steady dull throb in my thighs, the tremor all along my arms, the thick grime of dust muffling my skin.
Naomi Novik
#28. Few men are true masters over their women. In truth, I would eye with suspicion any woman who acts as if that is the truth. Either she lies, or she is so dull-witted or weak-spirited that she will make you a tedious wife.
Hannah Howell
#29. A thrilling story can be dull if told badly, but even the most mundane event can be elevated into a tale of epic scale by a good storyteller.
Johnny Rich
#30. Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.
Burton Raffel
#31. No matter how much you want to cut your family out of your heart, you can't. The bond is born when you are born, like an organ in your body. There is no surgery to remove it. When it is diseased, you live with a dull ache telling you that something inside you is not right.
Lisa Wingate
#32. The idea [of therapy] isn't to give people answers, or lead their bark of longing into a safe, dull, protected harbor, but to make people aware of the depths of possibility in their hearts and lives; help them remove the barriers that keep them from being the people they were meant to be.
John O'Donohue
#33. A wise person is full of questions. A dull person is full of answers.
Paulo Coelho
#34. Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.
Mason Cooley
#35. M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.
Oscar Wilde
#36. Life is to short and dull not to have a book you like in hand.
Peter Richards
#37. If our ballets be feeble, monotonous and dull, if they be devoid of ideas, meaning, expression and character, it is less the fault of the art than that of the artist.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#38. Mental health is seen as a massive drag to have to write about - worthy, dull. Something you should 'have' to read / write about.
Caitlin Moran
#39. When you observe that the fire in your room is getting dull, you do not always put on more coal, but simply stir with the poker; so God often uses the black poker of adversity in order that the flames of devotion may burn more brightly.
Arthur W. Pink
#40. Anger will make a dull man witty, but very little money.
Elizabeth I
#41. I have known people," he said, "who succeeded because they had a rip-roaring good time conducting their business. Later, I saw those people change as the fun became work. The business had grown dull.
Dale Carnegie
#42. The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer.
Jack Finney
#43. My intellect, my wit - I'd forgotten I'd even possessed them, and they were dull and neglected, to be sure. But in the company of others who prized thought over action, laughter over brooding, they blossomed and sharpened. My tongue fairly tripped with sparkling phrases, insightful comments.
Melanie Benjamin
#44. Marriage is a land mine. A really intimate land mine. Adultery to kitchen fires. Never a dull [moment].
Nora Roberts
#45. His bed was where they slept and where the great thing people warned about or giggled about took place. It was not so much painful as dull. Cee thought it would get better later. Better turned out to be simply more, and while the quantity increased, its pleasure lay in its brevity.
Toni Morrison
#46. Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.
Hanya Yanagihara
#48. Reality really isn't as dull as it's cracked up to be.
Estelle
#49. The sincere artist is usually his own best critic, but continuous and prolonged work on one painting will sometimes dull his judgment ... The critic is in demand, but he must be competent.
Walter J. Phillips
#50. Living sites are only as good as today's update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren't there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.
Mark Bernstein
#51. I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
Heinrich Heine
#52. Problems are there to be solved. How dull life would be without them.
Philip Sington
#53. It is, I think, a good deal owing to the preponderance of the commercial element in Society that conversation has sunk to its present dull level of conventional chatter.
Dorothy Nevill
#54. My son craves picture books about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and the Hulk; they show one fantastic creature smashing or zapping another into smithereens on page after page. They are dull and ugly and show no interesting stories or models of conflict resolution or character building.
Russell Smith
#55. If I had followed my better judgment always, my life would have been a very dull one.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#56. An apostate scientist, a kidnapped scientist, a dull peasant, a two-headed monster, an apple-brained moron
five knives, counting Joe-Jim as one; five brains, counting Joe-Jim as two and Bobo as none
five brains and five knives to overthrow an entire culture.
Robert A. Heinlein
#57. Above all I am hoping for trees, which may afford me some means of concealment and food and shelter. Often there are trees because barren landscapes are dull and the Games resolve too quickly without them.
Suzanne Collins
#58. People're a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can't hold, needs for things you can.
David Mitchell
#59. The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.
Heinrich Heine
#61. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I ... I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?
Angela Carter
#62. And though I might have learnt more wit and advanced my understanding by living in a Court, yet being dull, fearful and bashful, I neither heeded what was said or practised, but just what belonged to my loyal duty and my own honest reputation.
Margaret Cavendish
#64. The difference between people is that we are all different. If we were the same we would be boring, dull, not that fun. We need to be different if we weren't what type of world would we have?
Lindsey Johnson
#65. He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world.
T.H. White
#66. If you can't see the bright side, why ya just need to polish the dull one.
Shelley Shepard Gray
#68. A Local Government Stationery Store is something to behold. It's like walking through the back of a cupboard into a really dull Narnia.
Sally Phillips
#69. The commercial storm leaves its path strewn with ruin. When it is over there is calm, but a dull, heavy calm.
Alfred Marshall
#70. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
#71. The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it's not fun, you're wasting your life.
Tom Peters
#72. Naturally there is reincarnation ... otherwise life would be pretty dull. All the patterns in this lifetime are results from patterns in other lifetimes.
Frederick Lenz
#73. A sculptor is supposed to be a dull dog anyway, so why should he not break out in colour sometimes, and in my case I'd as soon be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Jacob Epstein
#74. The dull, hazy light played along the polished blade like water.
Steven Erikson
#75. At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded." ... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.
Donald O. Clifton
#76. I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!
Charles Dickens
#77. Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
James Joyce
#78. However smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull, dark mass of common thoughts - let thy genius rise as the sun from chaos.
Edward Young
#80. One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness.
Bruno Schulz
#82. Wind of the night, Questing, swaying, calling, Rustle of dull grasses, Why do you trouble me?
John Gould Fletcher
#83. Among many reasons for being stupid it may be urged, it is being like other people, and living like one's neighbours, and indeed without it, it may be difficult to love some neighbours as oneself: now seeing the necessity of being dull, you won't, I hope, take it amiss that you find me so ...
Elizabeth Montagu
#84. If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities.
Barbara Bush
#85. Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.
Orville Prescott
#86. St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#87. Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains?
Jess Walter
#88. He'd forget all that, just as he would forget this night.
The memories would linger for a time, but they'd grow dull. The ache he felt now, the frustation and anger and sorrow - all those would fade too.
She'd given him a night to remember, but of course he'd forget.
Loretta Chase
#89. Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it. Nor will a "pretty" face make it, for "pretty" faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces.
Robert Henri
#90. I can't quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another - me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority - which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.
Hanif Kureishi
#91. I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.
David Hockney
#92. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.
Oscar Wilde
#93. Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
J.M. Coetzee
#94. It was only then that he met Villefort's dull gaze, that look peculiar to men of the law who do not want anyone to read their thoughts, and so make their eyes into unpolished glass. The look reminded him that he was standing before Justice, a figure of grim aspect and manners.
Alexandre Dumas
#95. You stop pretending life is such fin or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people.
Anne Lamott
#96. My secret is cool and mysterious like a jagged scar across my chest, and not dull and heavy like I gave up church buy not the angst.
J.C. Lillis
#97. We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.
Robert Fulghum
#98. There followed a time when everything was dull. The things that had meant something lost importance, though they were still there, like bruises on the body that fade to hard lumps under the skin.
Tracy Chevalier
#99. Cold prayers shall never have any warm answers. God will suit His returns to our requests. Lifeless, services shall have lifeless answers. When men are dull, God will be dumb.
Thomas Brooks
#100. When crime was working as it was supposed to it was very dull. Very lucrative and very dull.
E.L. Doctorow
