Boredom

Sometimes the eye gets so accustomed that if you don't have a change, you're bored. It's the same with fashion, you know. And that, I suppose, is what style is about.
~ Bill Blass, in W magazine (25 February 1983).

I have spent more time being slowly and excruciatingly bored by children than any other section of the human race.
~ William Edgar Borah

I find we are growing serious, and then we are in great danger of being dull.
~ William Congreve, The Old Bachelor (1693).

I dare you, who think life is humdrum, to become involved. I dare you who are weak to become strong; you who are dull to be sparkling; you who are slaves to be kings.
~ William H. Danforth, I Dare You! (1931).

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
~ William Golding

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.
~ Billy Graham

We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people. Use may in part reconcile us to our own tediousness, but we do not adopt that of others on the same paternal principle. We may be willing to sell a story twice, never to hear one more than once.
~ William Hazlitt, in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (1930). Characteristics (written in 1823)

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Outspoken Essays, First Series (1919). Our Present Discontents

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, The End of an Age (1948).

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they are supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

You can get a great deal of entertainment out of tedious people if you keep your head.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

People who wait around for life to supply their satisfaction usually find boredom instead.
~ Dr. William C. Menninger

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment -- but many other things ceased as well!
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888). Section 48

Is life not a hundred times too short to be bored in it?
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1885-86). Part 7: Our Virtues, Aphorism 227

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. . . . A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. Second Sequel: The Wanderer and His Shadow (December 1879).

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
~ William Phillips, from A Sense of the Present (1967).

Boredom is a self-inflicted insult.
~ Bill Purdin, Legend, Inc. (accessed May 2003). Quote Archives.

A certain power to endure boredom is essential to a happy life. The lives of most great men have not been exciting except at a few great moments. A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Boredom is . . . a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930).

Running away from enemies who are trying to take one's life is, I imagine, unpleasant, but certainly not boring. . . . The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930). Boredom and Excitement

If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.
~ William Saroyan

If all the year were playing holidays
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished for come.
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I. Act I, scene ii

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
~ William Shakespeare, King John. Act III, scene iv

I have never been bored an hour in my life. I get up every morning wondering what new strange glamorous thing is going to happen and it happens at fairly regular intervals.
~ William Allen White

There are holes as big as hovels in the wall of platitude.
~ Oscar Williams, The Man Coming Toward You (1940). Dwarf of Disintegration

No, I am not asleep, but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams

We do not have to accept boredom, dullness, low mental pressure; a steady effort of willed concentration can . . . produce an expanding sense of meaning.
~ Colin Henry Wilson, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972).

Dullness is a misdemeanour.
~ Ethel Davis Wilson, from Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, and Letters (1987). A Cat Among the Falcons (1959 essay)