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Boredom

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That inner vacuity and emptiness that is stamped on innumerable faces and also betrays itself in a constant and lively attention to all events in the external world, even the most trivial ... is the real source of boredom. ... The principal result of this inner vacuity is the craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind. ... Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

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."

Quotes

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  • Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
    • Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories (1987), translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1990), p. 100
  • 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.
  • Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
    • Emile Cioran, Histoire et utopie ("History and Utopia") (1960)
  • Boredom helps one to make decisions.
  • Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
    • Guy Debord, The Incomplete Works of the Situationist International, The Bad Old Days Will End (Nov. 1963)
  • Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
    • Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), p. 134
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Man is the only animal that can be bored.
  • I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.
    • Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 150
  • Boredom is boredom. There is nothing to do, deal with it.
  • The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse.
  • I do not care for anything. I do not care to ride, for the exercise is too violent. I do not care to walk, walking is too strenuous. I do not care to lie down, for that I should either have to remain lying, and I do not care to do that, or I should have to get up again, and I do not care to do that either. Summa summarum: I do not care at all.
  • She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself.
  • 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
  • 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)
  • The result of this mental dullness is that inner vacuity and emptiness that is stamped on innumerable faces and also betrays itself in a constant and lively attention to all events in the external world, even the most trivial. This vacuity is the real source of boredom and always craves for external excitement in order to set the mind and spirits in motion through something. Therefore in the choice thereof it is not fastidious, as is testified by the miserable and wretched pastimes to which people have recourse. ... The principal result of this inner vacuity is the craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind which lead many to extravagance and so to misery. Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind, for the more eminent it becomes, the less room does it leave for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of ideas, their constantly renewed play with the manifold phenomena of the inner and outer worlds, the power and urge always to make different combinations of them, all these put the eminent mind, apart from moments of relaxation, quite beyond the reach of boredom.
    • Arthur Schopenhauer, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” Parerga und Paralipomena, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 329-330
  • Human beings are addicted to meaning. We all have a great problem: Our lives must have some sort of content. We cannot bear to live our lives without some sort of content that we can see as constituting a meaning. Meaninglessness is boring. And boredom can be described metaphorically as a meaning withdrawal. Boredom can be understood as a discomfort which communicates that the need for meaning is not being satisfied.
  • It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up from boredom.
    • Wallace Stevens, "The Irrational Element in Poetry" (December 1936), repr. in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 788
  • Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
  • The way to be bored is to know where you are going and the way to get there.
  • Soon he [Vronsky] felt rising in his soul a desire for desires — boredom.
  • The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui.
    • Helen Westley as quoted in "The Confessions of Helen Westley" by Djuna Barnes in New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine (23 September 1917)
  • What excited me was the recognition that this was simply another version of the problem that had obsessed me all of my life -- the problem of those moments when life seems entirely delightful, when we experience a sensation of what G.K. Chesterton called "absurd good news." Life normally strikes most of us as hard, dull and unsatisfying; but in these moments, consciousness seems to glow and expand, and all the contradictions seem to be resolved. Which of the two visions is true? My own reflections had led me to conclude that the vision of "absurd good news" is somehow broader and more comprehensive than the feeling that life is dull, boring and meaningless. Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one?
  • Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.

See also

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Wiktionary
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