Boredom

Boredom is a reactive state of emotion that interprets the condition of one's environment as wearingly dull due to repetitive, non-existent or tedious stimuli. Boredom stems from a lack of interesting things to see, hear, or do (physically or intellectually) when not in the mood of "doing anything."

Sourced

• Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
  • Emile Cioran, Histoire et utopie ("History and Utopia") (1960)

• A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
  • Arthur C. Clark, Childhood's End, Ch. 10 (1953)

• Boredom helps one to make decisions.
  • Colette, Gigi, Aunt Alicia (1945)

• Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
  • Guy Debord, The Incomplete Works of the Situationist International, The Bad Old Days Will End (Nov. 1963)

• Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945)

• But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Pt. I, Ch. VII (1857)

• Man is the only animal that can be bored.
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)

• Tedium is the worst pain.
  • John Gardner, Grendel (1971)

• Idleness, then, is so far from being the root of all evil that it is rather the true good. Boredom is the root of evil; it is that which must be held off.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part One: Either, Crop Rotation (1843)

• Many felt there was something not quite right about a man who professed himself so profoundly bored with the subject of sport.
  • Neil McKenna, of Oscar Wilde, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, 2005, p. 4

• In principio, dunque, era la noia, volgarmente chiamata caos. Iddio, annoiandosi della noia, creò la terra, il cielo, l'acqua, gli animali, le piante, Adamo ed Èva; i quali ultimi, annoiandosi a loro volta in paradiso, mangiarono il frutto proibito. Iddio si annoiò di loro e li cacciò dall'Eden.
  • Translation: In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the earth, the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve; and the latter, bored in their turn in paradise, ate the forbidden fruit. God became bored with them and drove them out of Eden.
  • Alberto Moravia, La noia (Milano: Bompiani, 1960) pp. 10-11; Angus Davidson (trans.) Boredom (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999) p. 8.

• Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 48 (1888)

• Nous pardonnons souvent à ceux qui nous ennuient, mais nous ne pouvons pardonner à ceux que nous ennuyons.
  • Translation: We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.
  • François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, Maxim 304 (1665–1678)

• Boredom is therefore 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, Ch. 4: Boredom and Excitement (1930)

• Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
  • Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, "Emotions, p. 36 (1973)

See also

• Bores