Top 95 Quotes About Tedium
#1. The daring venture, the prolonged distrust, the cruel Nay, the tedium, the cutting-into-the-quick - how seldom do THESE come together! Out of such seed, however - is truth produced!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. (About parenting ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.
Anne Tyler
#4. Tedium is the worst pain. the mind lays out the world in blocks, and the hushed blood waits for revenge. all order, i've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal - a harmless sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world - two snake pits.
John Gardner
#5. (To those who are themselves unhappy, the contentment of others can sometimes be mistaken for tedium.)
John Connolly
#6. It is quite impossible to guess in advance what will interest a man, but most men are capable of a keen interest in something or other, and when once such an interest has been aroused their life becomes free from tedium.
Bertrand Russell
#7. The day-to-day grind of adult life brings with it a tedium that weighs heavily on our powers of attention. The same experiences, at the same time and place, day in and day out, breed a familiarity that blunts our senses.
Chris Matakas
#8. They spent the rest of that afternoon together. Maybe he felt guilty for giving Quentin the cigarette, or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin's company. Maybe he just needed a straight man. He
Lev Grossman
#9. I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.
Gayle Forman
#10. That's a terrible price to pay because you loved life so much, with the intensity of a thousand suns, and the women and all of it - and then it's all taken away from you. You end up walking the hallways of always to a place called tedium and apathy, day after day after day. Years go by.
George Jung
#11. Life can make a person weary and wary, and the body and soul become fatigued. Unalleviated tedium extinguishes the light in the soul.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#12. Flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure.
Sinclair Lewis
#13. The tedium vitae so constant in antiquity was due to the fact that the outstanding individual was what others could not be; the inspiration of modern times will be that any man who finds himself, religiously speaking, has only achieved what every one can achieve.
Soren Kierkegaard
#14. Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
Christopher Hitchens
#15. Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation!
Molly Haskell
#16. She wasn't a victim of fate, she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia - however absurd that might seem.
Paulo Coelho
#18. Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).
James K.A. Smith
#19. The reason why I hate working in theatre is the tedium of memorisation. But once that is done, then you feast on this never-ending meal. If you play it correctly, every night is fraught with very high stakes that are very difficult to find in everyday life.
Christopher Meloni
#20. Real artists free of the tedium of money can use, now, all of society as an idea factory.
Andrei Codrescu
#21. The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
Russell Baker
#22. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
W. Somerset Maugham
#24. Police work can grind a man down, mentally, more than physically. I sensed that it is because of the hours of tedium and boredom, interrupted by moments of sheer terror.
James J. Kavanaugh
#25. These days you're not just competing with the tedium, you're competing with the cellphone.
Billy Corgan
#26. Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.
Erma Bombeck
#27. Science exacts a substantial entry fee in effort and tedium in exchange for its insights.
Carl Sagan
#28. Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.
Robert South
#29. Do you really think men and women thanked you for bringing them peace? They just became bored with your peace and so brewed their own trouble to fill the boredom. Men don't want peace, Arthur, they want distraction from tedium,
Bernard Cornwell
#30. Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.
Octavio Paz
#31. We don't actually want our young people to encounter the mysteries of love anyway; best to keep them preoccupied with the tedium of lust instead. The
Anthony Esolen
#32. To learn a musical instrument. you had to have a certain tolerance for tedium and failure.
Maggie Stiefvater
#33. I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.
Fernando Pessoa
#34. The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt.
John C. Wright
#35. Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.
Victor Hugo
#36. Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is ... True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care
with no one there to see or cheer.
David Foster Wallace
#37. It is easy to miss the possibility that every person who crosses your path can become an event and a memory, good or bad, to fill in the hours with experience instead of tedium, to break the monotony of the passing moments.
R.A. Salvatore
#38. Your basic problem is emotional immaturity. You want life to be like in the movies, full of excitement. That's how a child's mind works, but the adults accept regularity, tedium, frustration.
Edward Bunker
#39. Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.
Paul Theroux
#40. The same practice was continued every evening through the whole course, and with the same success. Many individuals expressed their gratification at having discovered such simple means of relieving the tedium of a long discourse.
George Combe
#41. Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Arnold Bennett
#42. He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take - all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all.
Thomas Pynchon
#43. I abhor running real risks, but it's not because I'm afraid of feeling too intensely. It's because they break my perfect focus on my sensations, and this disturbs and depersonalizes me.
I never go where there's risk. I fear the tedium of dangers.
Fernando Pessoa
#44. I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.
Peggy Noonan
#45. Excellent; all is well. The 'everlasting tedium' exactly countervenes the 'immediate onset of death' and I am left only with the 'canker' which, in the person of Firx, already afflicts me. One must use his wits in dealing with maledictions.
Jack Vance
#46. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
Saul Bellow
#47. Tedium is a dangerous thing, potentially lethal.
Nina -
#48. It's a funny thing - the reality is I have no feelings about school. It's long gone. Funnily enough, the bad memories - of which I don't have any left to be honest, I can just remember a sense of tedium - have faded. And teachers that I liked have remained quite vivid. There are three or four left.
Colin Firth
#49. I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life.
Julie Schumacher
#50. Whose fine idea had it been, on the Olympian heights or deep in the bowel-dark underworld, to condemn us to the messy, intractable burden of bodies, the sheer tedium of our confinement in the flesh?
Paul Russell
#51. When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
Emile Zola
#52. So it is in life ... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throw them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they'll row their way to the real truth ...
Anton Chekhov
#53. No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it.
Mary Doria Russell
#54. Anyone can take a nice picture of something pretty. Being able to show the beauty in ugliness and the interest in tedium - that's what makes you a real photographer.
Becca Mills
#55. Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises.
Pope Benedict XVI
#56. A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.
Michael Dirda
#57. I shall never complain of the tedium of the city again.
Alison Croggon
#58. Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
Philip Guedalla
#59. I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, that thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called 'Paradox Lost'.
G.K. Chesterton
#60. Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.
Tom Stoppard
#61. The man of method may channel all his spiritual currents towards productive ends, be relentless in his suppression of predilection and propensity, but when accident upsets the flow of his life, he finds himself drowning in a sea of tedium, hatred, and rage.
Juan Filloy
#62. Tedium and boredom are related, but not identical. Tedium comes from a person lacking an ideology to live by; the dulling fear fomented in the soul after confronting the paucity of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#63. It's a two-dimensional gig being a singer, and you can get lost in your own tedium and repetition.
Robert Plant
#64. Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
G.K. Chesterton
#65. It's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things
fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too ... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.
Helen Oyeyemi
#66. Too often there is this sinister greed that pulls at my coattails, subtly whispering in the ear of my soul that it is within my rights to tuck away a few dark trinkets to toy with when the tedium of righteous living gets a bit boring. But God would suggest that I empty my pockets.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#67. Failure to spend the [presentation] time wisely and well, failure to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten, and most important of all, failure to maintain attention and interest should be punishable by stoning. There is no excuse for tedium.
Jay H. Lehr
#69. Tedium is the bane of immortality.
Neil Lowe
#70. The celestial brightness of Pride and Prejudice is unequalled even in Jane Austen's other work; after a life of much disappointment and grief, in which some people would have seen nothing but tedium and emptiness, she stepped forth as an author, breathing gaiety and youth, robed in dazzling light.
Elizabeth Jenkins
#71. Her husband sat silently while she talked, his hands fisted together, his half-smile set in concrete; he looked wisely down at the tablecloth. So this is marriage, I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose.
Margaret Atwood
#72. On graduating from school, a studious young man who would withstand the tedium and monotony of his duties has no choice but to lose himself in some branch of science or literature completely irrelevant to his assignment.
Charles-Augustin De Coulomb
#73. A white van drove slowly - as slowly as only an inexperienced and frightened driver could go
down San Pablo Avenue. It came to a stop at a distance, and Caine found himself hoping it was
trouble. Trouble he could handle. A fight would be a wonderful relief from the tedium.
Michael Grant
#74. The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.
Shirley Hazzard
#75. Perhaps there is no agony worse than the tedium I experienced waiting for Something to Happen.
Lance Loud
#76. With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination.
Oriana Fallaci
#77. Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship
you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!
Tobsha Learner
#78. Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.
John Carroll
#79. I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.
David Foster Wallace
#80. The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. The work that is done in love loses half its tedium and difficulty.
Thomas Guthrie
#82. I think that's the biggest favor you can grant anyone, don't you? Permission to be dull. I know Henry will sometimes say something so utterly uninteresting that I could faint. And that's when you know you're in love; the tedium isn't unbearable, it's lovely.
Lionel Shriver
#83. Every milestone in the history of the company, even when forecast with heaps of hoopla, was ultimately played out according to some secret timeline of geologic tedium, so that it was drained of all interest and drama well before it took place and afterward went all but unnoticed.
Thomas Ligotti
#84. 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
#85. Sometimes fear and dread are superior to tedium.
Lisa Lutz
#86. It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary.
Fernando Pessoa
#87. We're here to change the world, not participate in its tedium.
Chuck Wendig
#88. Once in my room I don't have a goddamn clue what to do.
Kelly Thompson
#89. It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends
Milan Kundera
#90. That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.
Robert Graves
#91. When you feel bored, pump your adrenaline!
Toba Beta
#92. The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#93. The most tedious details are the most like dreams.
Gerhard Roth
#94. It seemed to her as if it had been an unpleasant day. She went over the actual events in her mind, and was astonished to find that, after all, the day had been like many hundreds before it and many, many more that were yet to come.
Arthur Schnitzler
#95. Sadder than a ticking clock, the moments without you
John Geddes
