Sunday, June 20, 2021 – A Bit Bored
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
What’s wrong with being a boring kind of guy? ~ George H. W. Bush
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable 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
Though we all know what boredom is, most normal adults do not experience sheer boredom very often. We are stressed, rushed, and worried, but we are seldom purely bored – in part because we are so stressed, rushed, and worried. Time without anything we must attend to usually feels like a breather, not like a monotony. To get a feel for what sheer boredom is like, we must hearken back to childhood. Children and adolescents are frequently bored, so bored they can hardly even stand it. Their perfectly normal developmental need for constant stimulation, for exploring and ongoing learning, is often thwarted in a world of long trips, rainy afternoons, and study halls. In childhood, boredom can be excruciating, like a chronic spiritual headache, or a powerful thirst with no beverage to be had. It can hurt so bad that the poor kid feels like yelling out loud, or throwing something noisy at a wall. Extreme boredom is arguably a form of pain. ~ Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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
Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. ~ Renata Adler
Boredom: the desire for desires. ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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 ~ Soren Kierkegaard
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always. ~ Guy Debord
Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism. ~ Wendell Phillips
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. ~ Virginia Woolf
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
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Boredom is rage spread thin. ~ Paul Tillich
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life, the lesson of your utter insignificance. ~ Joseph Brodsky
I can excuse everything but boredom. Boring people don’t have to stay that way. ~ Hedy Lamarr
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. ~ Evelyn Waugh
I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom. ~ Heinrich Heine
In marketing you must choose between boredom, shouting and seduction. Which do you want? ~ Roy H. Williams
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom. ~ C. Northcote Parkinson
The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom. ~ Guy de Maupassant
Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring. ~ Edward Gorey
Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down. ~ Dave Barry
Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting. ~ Dave Barry
I like boring things. ~ Andy Warhol
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. ~ John Cage
If you think you’re boring your audience, go slower not faster. ~ Gustav Mahler
Just standing around looking beautiful is so boring. ~ Michelle Pfeiffer
Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom. ~ Anatole France
Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous. ~ Elias Canetti
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
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 forever on the go. And so people are always “on the go.” ~ Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
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
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people. ~ G. K. Chesterton
The Beatles saved the world from boredom. ~ George Harrison
Just Above Sunset 