Quotes about bores-and-boredom

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.

— Thomas B. Aldrich

The penalty for success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.

— Lady Nancy Astor

I have a fear of being boring.

— Christian Bale

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

— Charles Baudelaire

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

— Jean Baudrillard

Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

— Sir Cecil Beaton

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

— Walter Benjamin

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

— John Berger

The world is eaten up by boredom. You can't see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn't even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be for ever on the go. And so people are always on the go.

— Georges Bernanos

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner Resources. I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

— John Berryman

Bore -- a person who talks when you wish him to listen.

— Ambrose Bierce

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.

— Lady Bloomfield

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The things to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

— Gerald Brenan

One thing I can say about George... he may not be able to keep a job, but he's not boring.

— Barbara Bush

What's wrong with being a boring kind of guy?

— George Bush

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

— Samuel Butler

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

— Dale Carnegie

A yawn is a silent shout.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.

— Jeremy Collier

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

— Guy Debord

I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.

— Warwick Deeping

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

— Charles Dickens

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

— Benjamin Disraeli

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Life is never boring, but some people choose to be bored.

— Wayne Dyer

The concept of boredom entails an inability to use up present moments in a personally fulfilling way.

— Wayne Dyer

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

— Henry Ford

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.

— Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

— Billy Graham

Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull.

— Vance Havner

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

— Heraclitus

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

— Eric Hoffer

If you're bored with life -- you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things -- you don't have enough goals.

— Lou Holtz

Boring people are a reflection of boring people.

— Doug Horton

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

— Samuel Johnson

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

— Samuel Johnson

Boredom is the root of all evil--the despairing refusal to be oneself.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

— Søren Kierkegaard

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

— Søren Kierkegaard

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.

— Henry Kissinger

The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored.

— Jean De La Bruyere

The devil's name is dullness.

— Robert E. Lee

His shortcoming is his long staying.

— Lewis L. Lewisohn

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.

— Don Marquis

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

— Henry Miller

The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance.

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

You'll find boredom where there is an absence of a good idea.

— Earl Nightingale

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

— Ellen Parr

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.

— Blaise Pascal

And 'tis remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say.

— Matthew Prior

Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.

— Bertrand Russell

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

— Bertrand Russell

Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.

— George Sanders

People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men's blood. I only speak right on. I tell you that which you yourselves do know.

— William Shakespeare

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

— Susan Sontag

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

— Saul Steinberg

A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.

— Bert Leston Taylor

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

— Dylan Thomas

Boredom: the desire for desires.

— Count Leo Tolstoy

Boredom is a disease of the mind and psyche, an insidious disease. It not only takes the joy out of life, but the creativity as well. No one of God's children should ever be bored with life.

— Source Unknown

A bore is a man who has nothing to say and says it anyway.

— Source Unknown

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

— Source Unknown

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

— Source Unknown

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

— John Updike

All kinds are good except the kind that bores you.

— Voltaire