Boredom

Boredom is a reactive state of emotion that interprets the condition of one's environment as wearingly dull due to repetitive, non-existent or tedious stimuli. Boredom stems from a lack of interesting things to see, hear, or do (physically or intellectually) when not in the mood of "doing anything."

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• Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 48

• Many felt there was something not quite right about a man who professed himself so profoundly bored with the subject of sport.
  • Neil McKenna, of Oscar Wilde, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, 2005, p. 4

• Tedium is the worst pain.
  • John Gardner, Grendel

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• A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• 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, The Conquest of Happiness

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

• Boredom: the desire for desires.
  • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

• 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

• 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.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

• Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
  • Virginia Woolf

• Boredom is the root of all evil—the despairing refusal to be oneself.
  • Søren Kierkegaard

• Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
  • Emile Cioran, History and Utopia

• It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
  • Wallace Stevens

• Man is the only animal that can be bored.
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)

• Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
  • Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton

• The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
  • Cyril Parkinson

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
  • Ellen Parr

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

• The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
  • Arthur Schopenhauer

• We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.
  • François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

• Your true traveller finds boredom agreeable rather than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty—his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
  • Aldous Huxley

• "The cure for boredom is a good book"
  • T. Mike Runger