Quotations about Boredom

A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.

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Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Boredom: the desire for desires. ~Leo Tolstoy

A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days. ~Attributed to Goethe, by Huebsch

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 an emptiness filled with insistence. ~Leo Stein

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It’s a symptom of security. ~Eugene Ionesco

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. ~Norman Mailer

I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself. ~Jules Renard

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. ~Thomas Szasz

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true. ~William Inge

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

Earth’s nothing more than a rotating ball of boredom. ~Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “What You Leave Behind,” 1999, written by Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. ~Evelyn Waugh

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

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving. ~-Steven Wright

All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Boredom is a sickness the cure for which is work; pleasure is only a palliative. ~Le Duc de Lévis, Mémoires

The best cure for boredom is hard work. ~Proverb

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. ~Ellen Parr, quoted in Reader’s Digest “Quotable Quotes,” December 1980

There is no cure for curiosity. It must be outgrown or endured. A child is born with its mouth in position to utter the word “Why?” and when, at some later date, it is punished for asking too many questions, it thinks up enough additional questions during its punishment to make the Encyclopedia Britannica look sick. ~Boston Sunday Post, “Curiosity,” 1915 August 1st [Courtesy of Garson O’Toole, The Quote Investigator —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]