97 Boredom Quotes To Ponder

Life can often feel like it's moving at a snail's pace, especially during moments of monotony or routine. Whether you're stuck in a waiting room, trapped in a never-ending meeting, or simply having a lazy Sunday, boredom has a unique way of creeping into our lives. But did you know there's a silver lining to these dull moments? Throughout history, thinkers, writers, and even comedians have pondered the concept of boredom, offering insights that are as thought-provoking as they are amusing. In this blog post, we bring you a curated collection of the top 97 boredom quotes to reflect upon. Each quote offers a glimpse into the minds of those who have turned the mundane into something meaningful, providing a little food for thought next time you find yourself in a rut.

1. “When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.” - Eric Hoffer

2. “Only boring people get bored.” - Ruth Burke

3. “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

4. “The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.” - Michel Houellebecq

5. “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.” - Zelda Fitzgerald

6. “Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.” - Voltaire

7. “Doing anything when you're bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing. ” - Aidan Chambers

8. “I am never bored; to be bored is an insult to one's self.” - Jules Renard

9. “Die Belohnung für Langeweile sind Sicherheit und Geborgenheit.” - Hanif Kureishi

10. “The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” - Saul Steinberg

11. “My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.” - Anthony Swofford

12. “I always think boredom is to some extent the fault of the bored.” - Kate Ross

13. “Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.” - Andy Warhol

14. “The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.” - Jean Lorrain

15. “Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.” - Andrew Davidson

16. “Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.” - Ian Fleming

17. “Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.” - Queen Elizabeth I of England

18. “It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!” - André Breton

19. “Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?” - Gustave Flaubert

20. “Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear” - Daphne duMaurier

21. “Everything is boring, boredom is the other epidemic which is making Europe ripe for decline. Boredom is the end product of each and every civilization. It is the arteriosclerosis of the great thinking peoples. The moment always arrives where even God, whether he’s called Zeus, Zebaoth or Zoroaster, has finished creating the universe and asks: “What’s the point of it, actually?” He yawns and chucks it aside. Mankind does the same with civilization. Boredom is the condition of a people which no longer believes but all the same is doing just fine. Boredom is when every clock in the country is predestined to be correct. When the same naive flowers blossom again in the month of March. When every day the deaths of good family fathers are announced in the papers. When a war breaks out in the Balkans. When poems go on about the stars. Boredom is a symptom of aging. Boredom is the diagnosis that talent and virtue are slowly being spent. Boredom is the life-long determination to a form of being which has worn itself out.” - Iwan Goll

22. “Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.” - Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

23. “Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.” - Cory Doctorow

24. “But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.” - Thomas Mann

25. “If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

26. “Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.” - Saul Bellow

27. “Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.” - John Keats

28. “If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

29. “Well, if you weren't flirting with him"-his voice had now grown a little plaintive-"who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?""If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home." Astrid sighed carelessly, "What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress.” - Anna Godbersen

30. “Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.” - Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

31. “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” - Albert Camus

32. “When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.” - Joseph Brodsky

33. “He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.” - Gustave Flaubert

34. “What's this about?""Finally. Interest," was the only response."If this is one of your tricks..." Like the time Torin had ordered hundreds of blow-up dolls and placed them throughout the fortress, all because Paris had foolishly complained about the lack of female companionship in town. The plastic "ladies" had stared our from every corner, their wide eyes and let-me-suck-you mouths taunting everyone who passed them.Things like that happened when Torin was bored.” - Gena Showalter

35. “Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.” - William Inge

36. “Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.” - Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

37. “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” - Émile Zola

38. “Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.” - Christopher Hitchens

39. “Boring is the right thought at the wrong time.” - Jack Gardner

40. “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

41. “And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together—year after year—for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom—or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room—waiting to be discovered!” - Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

42. “Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.” - Albert Camus

43. “I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.” - Isaac Asimov

44. “My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

45. “We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

46. “The glance embroiders in joy, knits in pain, and sews in boredom.When indifferent, the eye takes stills, when interested, movies.Laughter is regional: a smile extends over the whole face.” - Malcolm de Chazal

47. “The Beatles saved the world from boredom.” - George Harrison

48. “To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.” - David Foster Wallace

49. “Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.” - G.K. Chesterton

50. “To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.” - E.B. Sledge

51. “When you feel bored, pump your adrenaline!” - Toba Beta

52. “I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.” - Dorothy Parker

53. “Feeling bored is a childish attitude.You wouldn't feel so if you don't relyon somebody to change your feeling.” - Toba Beta

54. “Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

55. “Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.” - Peter Kreeft

56. “Boredom, that traitorous devil that posseses us to do things sometimes useless, and often stupid.” - Apol Lejano-Massebieau

57. “The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.” - Peter Kreeft

58. “The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.” - Criss Jami

59. “Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.” - David Foster Wallace

60. “Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine ― that is, activity ― which could solve it, is seen as odious.Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw.Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on.Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most unmanning.Eventually, it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing ― a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.” - Margaret George

61. “Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

62. “What kind of life can you have in a house without books?” - Sherman Alexie

63. “I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.” - Louis C.K.

64. “The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.” - Peter Kreeft

65. “Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.” - Emil Cioran

66. “At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.” - Benjamin J. Carey

67. “You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.” - Andy Warhol

68. “Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.” - Julian Barnes

69. “One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and whatpeople can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities,the result is boredom. But when thematch is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.” - Daniel H. Pink

70. “Jessica walked away from Aaron and Ken, flashing them both a big smile. They were both very attractive – she had dated each of them a number of times. In fact, not too long ago she had contemplated falling in love with Ken for lack of anything better to do.” - Francine Pascal

71. “That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.” - Maria Semple

72. “If you're bored, you're boring.” - Barbara "Cutie" Cooper

73. “Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.” - Stephen King

74. “Worry is like a rocking chair-it keeps you busy but gets you nowhere.” - Katie Dale

75. “Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.” - Robert McKee

76. “The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.” - Vladimir Nabokov

77. “Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands–they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied.” - Maria von Trapp

78. “She was surprised at how deflating his presence was.” - Tom McNeal

79. “Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.” - Dejan Stojanovic

80. “Lazy people live lonely lives.” - Habeeb Akande

81. “Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.” - Gerald Brenan

82. “Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

83. “Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?” - Félix J. Palma

84. “Boredom looms over the liveliest lessons, seeking to destroy.” - Marina Leigh Duff

85. “I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...” - Roberto Bolaño

86. “I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.” - Marsha Norman

87. “No. You can't. And I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it. So. Let's just have a good time.” - Marsha Norman

88. “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

89. “Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.” - Saul Bellow

90. “Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.” - Victor Hugo

91. “This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.” - Walter Benjamin

92. “A bouquet yellow like remorse Hurts my view The cage The wheel The vile ennui of all mankind And no one no one to break my chains!("Outcries")” - Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen

93. “What was the fun of being upper-class if you had to work so hard to appear bored all the time?” - Troy Soos

94. “Humor can make a serious difference. In the workplace, at home, in all areas of life – looking for a reason to laugh is necessary. A sense of humor helps us to get through the dull times, cope with the difficult times, enjoy the good times and manage the scary times.” - Steve Goodier

95. “The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.” - Hugh MacLeod

96. “Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

97. “The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire... "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.” - Josef Pieper