Quotes about boredom

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.

Boredom is so endemic to our culture, particularly among youth, that we imagine it to be a near-universal default state of human existence. In the absence of outside stimuli we are bored. Yet…boredom is virtually unique to Western culture (and by extension to the global culture it increasingly dominates).…greed like boredom is absent in most hunter-gatherer cultures based on a more open conception of self.

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. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse. To amuse themselves, they hit upon the notion of building a tower so high that it would reach the sky. This notion is just as boring as the tower was high and is a terrible demonstration of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then they were dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And what consequences this boredom had: humankind stood tall and fell far, first through Eve, then from the Babylonian tower.

“The one unforgivable sin,” she used to say, “is to be boring.”

Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.

Astfgl had achieved in Hell a particularly high brand of boredom which is like the boredom you get which a) is costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a nice time. (p. 165)

Now he realized what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them. For boredom to be enjoyable there had to be something to compare it with. (p. 169)

The allure of travel gradually faded away from my roman. Once upon a time my heart danced just by imaging any of its symbols, a train, a steamship, towns of unknown foreign lands. Nonetheless, my past experiences taught me that travel is no more than the simple "movement of the same thing within the same space." No matter where you go, you find the same kinds of people live, repeating the same kinds of monotonous lives, in the same kinds of villages or towns. In any small town in the countryside, the merchant is fiddling with his abacus at his storefront, looking out at the whitish street all day, the public servant is smoking in his office, thinking about things like vegetables in his lunch box, as they live each tasteless, monotonous day the same way, day after day, watching their lives gradually grow old. The allure of travel came merely to project in my tired heart the image of an endlessly bored landscape like a Chinese parasol tree that grows in some vacant lot, making me feel a tasteless hatred and leeriness for human life in which identical rules repeat themselves no matter where you turn. In short, I lost interest in any kind of travel, the romance of it.

There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him. ...[S]he had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. ...She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

"Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there."

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.