Quotes and passages on caring

I’ve got a great ambition to die
of exhaustion rather than boredom.

Thomas Carlyle

Your true travelers find boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of their liberty-- their excessive freedom. They accept their boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. Aldous Huxley The cure to boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. Dorothy Parker

Boredom is a filter. Common ideas come before it. Uncommon ideas come after it. Sit with a project long enough to get bored with it, then sit a little more. The most useful insights bubble up after you get bored. James Clear

"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.

"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 Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Friedrich Nietzsche

quotations - contents - welcome page - obstacles
the people behind the words - our current e-zine - articles and excerpts
Daily Meditations, Year One - Year Two - Year Three - Year Four

Sign up for your free daily spiritual or general quotation ~ ~ Sign up for your free daily meditation

The truth is that everyone is bored, and we devote ourselves to cultivating habits.

Albert Camus

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

Victor Hugo
Les Miserables

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the
boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it,
because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,
and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner
Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

To be, in a word, unborable. . . . It is the key to modern life.
If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

David Foster Wallace
The Pale King

Of course, it is boring to read about boring things, but it is better
to read something that makes you yawn with boredom than
something that will make you weep uncontrollably, pound
your fists against the floor, and leave tearstains all over
your pillowcase, sheets, and boomerang collection.

Lemony Snicket
The Grim Grotto

Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together
physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.

Richard Bach
The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

People had been working for so many years to make the world
a safe, organized place. nobody realized how boring it would
become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited
and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and
registered and addressed and recorded. nobody had left much
room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On
a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind
of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat
the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even
a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real
disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation.
Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Chuck Palahniuk
Asfixia

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and
excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed
vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is
dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence
with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening
of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be
a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life,
as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment
of later years. . . the alienation from the sources of our strength.

Rachel Carson
The Sense of Wonder

You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.

Andy Warhol

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved,
or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained.
The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of
time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do.
A sense that we are not amused.

Michael Crichton
Timeline

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

In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom.
It is not always an easy choice.

Richard Bach
Illusions

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

Eric Hoffer

We have some inspiring and motivational books that may interest you. Our main way of supporting this site is through the sale of books, either physical copies or digital copies for your Amazon Kindle (including the online reader). All of the money that we earn through them comes back to the site in one way or another. Just click on the picture to the left to visit our page of books, both fiction and non-fiction!

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger
are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone
from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror;
the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.

Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since
at least half the sins of humankind are caused by the fear of it.

Bertrand Russell
The Conquest of Happiness

Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind
of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are,
they aren't interesting enough for you, so you decide--
and boredom is a decision--that you are bored.

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us.
The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become
ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.

James Clear
Atomic Habits

I am never bored; to be bored is an insult to one's self.

Jules Renard

Boredom is the mother of imagination. How many of us began to be
writers--even if it was telling stories to ourselves or other children--
because of a lonesome childhood, or a childhood of sickness, or long
afternoons in a house of grownups and grownup books, or later,
endless tedious classes, where one's own imagination was the only escape.
Boredom is endangered. We live in an age of passive entertainment,
and the mind is seldom if ever allowed to wander in search
of its own self-made pleasures.

A.E. Stallings

What keeps all living things busy and in motion is the striving
to exist. But when existence is secured, they do not know what
to do: that is why the second thing that sets them in motion is
a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it
any longer, "to kill time," i.e. to escape boredom.

Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Thomas Szasz

While most of us think of boredom as a negative feeling, it turns out
that not all experiences of boredom are bad. In fact, if it weren't for
boredom, you wouldn't be reading this book or any book by me. Let
me explain the research first. A recent study showed that simple,
boring tasks or mundane activities can allow our minds to wander,
daydream, and create. The lack of stimulation that defines "being
bored" gives our imagination room to play and grow.

A big part of my book writing routine is watching super predictable,
formulaic mysteries--even ones I've seen ten times. These shows
would bore me to tears if I were in a normal mental space. But when
I'm coding data and writing, something weird happens. It's like the
shows lull the easily distracted part of my brain into a rhythmic stupor,
setting free the deeper, meaning-making part of my brain to engage
and start making connections between things that don't seem
connectable. I actually sit on my couch with a notepad next to me
because the more bored I get, the more ideas bubble to the surface.

Brené Brown
Atlas of the Heart