Boredom Quotes

1. "Squeezed against each other in the heavy heat, they were silent...looking toward the home that was expecting them--quiet, perspiring, resigned to this existence divided among a soulless job, long trips coming and going in an uncomfortable trolley, and at the end an abrupt sleep. On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them. Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poverty. But now heat and boredom and fatigue were showing him their curse, the curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short."
Author: Albert Camus

2. "Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom..."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money."
Author: Andrei Codrescu

4. "Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. ... I will do anything to escape boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough."
Author: Anne Carson

5. "If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

6. "Judas, boredom is such a drag, drag, drag. Writing might be good therapy for me, though."
Author: Beatrice Sparks

7. "The one thing for an actor that is complete death is if you're bored, because that boredom will show in your work."
Author: Benjamin Bratt

8. "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."
Author: Charles Baudelaire

9. "What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

10. "The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

11. "Boredom can be a lethal thing on a small island."
Author: Christopher Moore

12. "Passion goes, Boredom remains."
Author: Coco Chanel

13. "Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work."
Author: David Ogilvy

14. "I think that its out very differences that make us a perfect match," he said, and his jaw moved under his fingertips. "You'd die of boredom with Thomas within a year. If I found a lady with a temper similar to mine, we'd tear each other apart within months. You and I, though, we're like bread and butter."She snorted. "That's romantic.""Hush," he said, his voice quivering with laughter, but also with an undertone of gravity. She cradled his jaw as he said, "Bread and butter. The bread provides stability for the butter; the butter gives taste to the bread. Together they're perfect." Her eye brows drew together. "I'm the bread, aren't I?""Sometimes." His voice was a thread of rumbled sound, low and ominous. She could feel his words as they drifted over her palm. "And sometimes I'm the bread and you're the butter. But we go together--you understand that, don't you?"
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

15. "I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

16. "Usually I avoided college students, whom I considered brutal, wrapped up in themselves, particularly in their youth, in which they found material for drama or an excuse for their own boredom. I did not care for young people."
Author: Françoise Sagan

17. "For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream."
Author: George Orwell

18. "They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth."
Author: Gloria Goldreich

19. "In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Homes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day's papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius."
Author: Graham Moore

20. "Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die."
Author: Henri Barbusse

21. "Boredom or discontent is useful to me when I acknowledge it and see clearly my assumption that there's something else I would rather be doing. In this way boredom can act as an invitation to freedom by opening me to new options and thoughts. For example, if I can't change the activity, can I look at it more honestly?"
Author: Hugh Prather

22. "The book in my hands became my trusted companion. What was written there had so much power that it forced me to stop avoiding myself, to make my own choices as well. And through some sort of vital intuition, I understood that I had a long way to go, that it would bring about a profound transformation within me, even though I could not determine it's essence, or its scope. In that book there was a voice, and behind that voice threw was an intelligence that sought to establish contact with me. It was not merely the company of written words that distiller my boredom. It was a living voice, speaking. To me."
Author: Ingrid Betancourt

23. "RIVETING TORPORIt is remarkable how far I am prepared to goIn order to avoid doing the one thing that mightProvide satisfaction, and it is remarkable to considerWhat I will do instead of it, purely for the pleasureOf being dissatisfied. When it is merely a matterOf sitting down for a few hours and dreamingThat something of value might eventually ariseFrom this routine of self-enforced boredom."
Author: John Tottenham

24. "Boredom is why God invented books."
Author: Julie Schumacher

25. "My life is a black hole of boredom and despair.""So basically you've been doing homework.""Like I said, black hole."
Author: Kiersten White

26. "Boredom will eventually set in... and one day you'll be standing still on an island, with no idea where to go, because all your bridges will have been burned.... The smaller you are, the larger and more terrifying the world. You should not be trying to reduce yourself so thoroughly."
Author: Kristina Meister

27. "For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time."
Author: Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

28. "Boredom is not black licorice, Snicket," she said. "There's no reason to share it with me."
Author: Lemony Snicket

29. "Boredom: the desire for desires."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

30. "You can be intensely aggravating..." His expression struck me as closer to boredom than aggravation. "And somehow I suspect this isn't the first time you've been told that.""Nope," I smiled mischievously. "Nor the last…"
Author: M.A. George

31. "But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men."
Author: Margaret Atwood

32. "What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson's corridors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Myst-like discoveries thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? Or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, we are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That permanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror."
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

33. "Boredom is peace misunderstood."
Author: Marty Rubin

34. "Boredom was born on a day of uniformity."
Author: Muriel Barbery

35. "When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them."
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

36. "Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in the rich house of her father-in-law during the five years of marriage to her unaffectionate husband; but, as often happens, no one paid the slightest attention to this boredom of hers."
Author: Nikolai Leskov

37. "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom."
Author: Raoul Vaneigem

38. "Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day."
Author: Robin Hobb

39. "Apes in their own habitat are less sexually driven than those in captivity. It must be that captivity, boredom, breeds lustfulness."
Author: Saul Bellow

40. "Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities."
Author: Saul Bellow

41. "When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic."
Author: Scott Thompson

42. "This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom."
Author: Stendhal

43. "They're a redefinition of boredom... the most important thing you need to know about an awards show is where is the nearest smoking opportunity."
Author: Stephen Daldry

44. "I don't want a well-ordered life.... I would die from boredom in a fortnight."
Author: Suzanne Enoch

45. "No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up to the evolutionary ladder."
Author: Terry Pratchett

46. "But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack."
Author: Thomas Mann

47. "There is no point of adventure if you have known about everything.I wonder how God deals with the situation, considering the boredom."
Author: Toba Beta

48. "We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits."
Author: Tom Robbins

49. "There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever."
Author: Viggo Mortensen

50. "How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me."
Author: William Gaddis

Boredom Quotes Pictures