Boredom Quotes - Page 26

• There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.

  Isaac Asimov

  Death, Sleep, Heaven

  Isaac Asimov (2009). “I, Asimov: A Memoir”, p.480, Bantam

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• 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

  Needs, Done, Should

  "Hangout and About, Part 1: Jason Isbell is Solo, But Not Alone" by Michael Bialas, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 3, 2013.

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• Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

  Martin Heidegger

  Men, Fog, Profound

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• There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death – ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.

  Hannah Arendt

  Lasting Happiness, Balance, Alive

  Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.108, University of Chicago Press

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• There is no one who has no leisure time at all. The office is not a permanent sanctuary, and Sundays are an institution. Thus, in principle, during those beautiful hours of free time everyone would have the opportunity to rouse himself into real boredom. But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn't interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.

  Siegfried Kracauer

  Beautiful, Real, Sunday

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• Rest forever, tired heart.
  The final illusion has perished.
  The one we believed eternal is gone.
  Just like that. Out the door desire
  follows hope. Rest forever.
  Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention
  nor is the earth worth a sigh.
  Bitterness and boredom is life,
  nothing else ever, and the world is mud.
  Quiet now. Despair for the last time.
  Fate gives us dying as a gift.
  Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power
  which rules for the common evil
  and the infinite vanity of it all.

  Giacomo Leopardi

  Tired, Heart, Fate

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• Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

  Laini Taylor

  Affliction, Terrible, Soulless

  Laini Taylor (2009). “Lips Touch: Three Times”, p.139, Scholastic Inc.

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• Nothing prevents boredom like a good book.

  Dav Pilkey

  Book, Good Book

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• Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Fun, Nice, Believe

  Sinclair Lewis (2015). “Babbitt”, p.62, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

  Edith Wharton

  Afternoon, Might, Chance

  Edith Wharton (2013). “House of Mirth and the Age of Innocence”, p.28, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Francoise Sagan

  Drama, College, People

  FRANCOISE SAGAN (1955). “BONOUR TRISTESSE”

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• Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

  Gautama Buddha

  Suicide, Buddhist, Blessing

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• Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Believe, Sweat, People

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• Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

  David Foster Wallace

  Crush, Gratitude, Lying

  "Will David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Be the Most Boring Book Ever?" by Lane Brown, www.vulture.com. March 3, 2009.

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• He managed to convey indifference, contempt, and boredom in the one word.

  Charlaine Harris

  Indifference, Contempt, One Word

  Charlaine Harris (2009). “Dead and Gone: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel”, p.85, Penguin

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• Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

  Gustave Flaubert

  Metaphor

  Gustave Flaubert (2005). “November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style”, Hesperus Press

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• To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

  William Safire

  Ambition, Ideas, Political

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• No-limit hold'em- Hours of boredom followed by moments of sheer terror.

  Tom McEvoy

  Ems, Limits, Moments

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• ...the number one reason knitters knit is because they are so smart that they need knitting to make boring things interesting. Knitters are so compellingly clever that they simply can't tolerate boredom. It takes more to engage and entertain this kind of human, and they need an outlet or they get into trouble. "...knitters just can't watch TV without doing something else. Knitters just can't wait in line, knitters just can't sit waiting at the doctor's office. Knitters need knitting to add a layer of interest in other, less constructive ways.

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Clever, Smart, Knitting

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• The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

  Ezra Pound

  Wall, Emotional, Garden

  'The Garden' (1916)

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• One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Book, Passion, Solitude

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• He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

  Peter De Vries

  Eye, Vanity, People

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• The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.

  Aleister Crowley

  Silly, Way, Facts

  Aleister Crowley (2010). “The Diary of a Drug Fiend”, p.47, Weiser Books

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• If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

  Douglas Coupland

  Jobs, Children, Night

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• You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

  Nick Cave

  Book, Fall, Hands

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