If you’ve found yourself staring blankly at a wall or failing to come up with something to fill your time, you’ve experienced Boredom. Boredom is a widespread feeling. Even though we have more activities and information serving our days than ever before – work, family, friends, travel, the internet, books, movies – boredom is still a part of life.

Boredom is usually associated with tedium, monotony, fatigue, routine, and even laziness. However, boredom can also be productive, motivating, or even peaceful. We’ve rounded up our favorite 100 quotes about being bored. These aren’t dull quotes; they’re interesting ones that reveal the many different aspects of boredom.

As these quotes about being bored show, there are many ways to approach boredom, and your approach will dictate how you deal with it. Boredom can encourage you to do some soul-searching, make necessary changes, or inspire you to create something unique!

Don’t also forget to check out these calming solitude quotes to bring you peace.

150 Boredom Quotes

Top 10 Boredom Quotes

“You don’t burn out from going too fast. You burn out from going too slow and getting bored.” – Cliff Burton

“Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.” – Anatole France

“We often boast that we are never bored, but yet we are so conceited that we do not perceive how often we bore others.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

“There’s no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes, Crazy, yes. But there’s no excuse for boredom, ever.” – Viggo Mortensen

“Perhaps the world’s second-worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.” – Jean Baudrillard

“Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.” – William Inge

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” – Susan Ertz

“In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.” – Richard Bach

“If we allow our ‘high creativity’ to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.” – Madeleine L’Engle

“Here’s what I’ve learned about raising boys… if you keep ’em busy, they’re fine. You let ’em get bored, they’ll dismantle your house board by board.” – Kenny Rogers

What Is Boredom?

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“Boredom: the desire of desire.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Boredom: The desire for desires.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Boredom, that traitorous devil that possesses us to do things sometimes useless, and often stupid.” – Apol Lejano-Massebieau

“Boredom ought to be one of the seven deadly sins. It deserves the honor.” – Frederick Buechner

“Boredom leads to one of these two things: more boredom or more creativity.” – Matthew Kobach

“Boredom is your mind and body’s way of telling you you’re not living up to your potential.” – Hal Sparks

“Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.” – Soren Kierkegaard

“Boredom is the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside of a situation, and one leads to the other.”

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” – Thomas Szasz

“Boredom is the fear of self.” – Marie Josephine de Suin

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” – Walter Benjamin

“Boredom is the deadliest poison.” – William F. Buckley

“Boredom is the conviction that you can’t change… the shriek of unused capacities.” – Saul Bellow

“Boredom is simply the absence of an interesting perspective.” – Brandon A. Trean

“Boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.” – James Clear

“Boredom is not a thing. It’s not a feeling or a condition. It is the absence of feelings, things, and conditions.” – A. A. Gill

“Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Boredom is just lack of attention.” – Sven Schnieders

“Boredom is a type of ingratitude.” – Daily Zen

“Boredom is a privilege. Instead of finding ways to entertain yourself, embrace the boredom. Your mind is finally free.” – Preethi Kasireddy

“Boredom is a privilege. Cherish it while it lasts instead of trying to fix it.” – Preethi Kasireddy

“Boredom is a pattern, not a reality.”

“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

“Boredom is a defense mechanism to avoid having to sit alone with our unaddressed thoughts.” – Naval Ravikant

“Boredom hits everyone from time to time.”

“Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.” – Susan Ertz

“Boredom comes from thinking this moment isn’t enough.” – James Pierce

“Boredom comes from a boring mind.” – Metallica

“Boredom and insecurity may have brought you into the cave but you don’t have to stay.” – Thema Bryant-Davis

“Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.”

Bored Life Quotes

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“Boredom is the inevitable consequence of a life devoted to pleasure.” – Kapil Gupta

“Boredom is an insult to life.” – Paulo Coelho

“There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.” – Cesare Pavese

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent, and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.” – Virginia Woolf

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.” – Lou Holtz

“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

“Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.” – Terry Pratchett

“He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama.” – Albert Camus

“Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.” – Dale Carnegie

“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.” – Albert Einstein

“A life without challenges is boring.”

“We try and make every good experience repeatable, and then run away from the resulting boredom.” – Naval Ravikant

“Top performers in any craft figure out a way to fall in love with boredom, put in their reps, and do the work.” – James Clear

“To be bored to death is a form of suicide.” – Frederick Buechner

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” – G.K. Chesterton

“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything.” – Charles Dickens

“Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“A little boredom can be a dangerous thing.”

“The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom.” – James Clear

“I take risks because I get bored. And I get bored very easily.” – Rihanna

“The price of being a sheep is boredom.”

Feeling Bored Quotes

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“I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.” – Charlotte Bronte

“There is no observable difference between peace and boredom – only your mindset.” – Angela Jiang

“You are not bored, you are boring.” – Brian Norgard

“When you’re bored with yourself, marry and be bored with someone else.” – Edward VIII

“To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.” – Milan Kundera

“To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.” – Heraclitus

“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” – Zelda Fitzgerald

“Remember, perfect is boring.”

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.” – Evelyn Waugh

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” – A.A. Milne

“Smartphones are boredom killers. Smartphones create boring people.”

“People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.” – Ama Ata Aidoo

“Order without diversity can result in monotony and boredom; diversity without order can produce chaos.” – Francis D.K. Ching

“Only the boring are bored.” – Joshua Fields Millburn

“Normal is so boring.”

“Never be bored, and you will never be boring.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.” – Anthony Swofford

“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.” – Thomas Carlyle

“I’m so bored of being bored because being bored is really boring.”

“Sometimes I think that we are living in a simulation controlled by the reigns of a destructive child who often gets bored or distracted, leaving us trapped inside feedback loops for years at a time.” – Mija

“Smartphones removed boredom at the cost of peace of mind.”

“Only boring people are bored.”

“I’m so bored I may even have to do some homework.” – Louise Rennison

“When I get bored, I get into trouble.” – Angie Harmon

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” – Albert Camus

“I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.” – Voltaire

Funny Boredom Quotes

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“The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.” – Lynda Barry

“The more you run from boredom, the more it follows you.” – James Pierce

“You’re bored? That’s because you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.” – Josemaria Escriva

“You’ll do better work if you’re bored rather than busy.” – Naval Ravikant

“You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” – Amos Tversky

“The only boring people I know are bored people.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

“When I get everything I want, I will die of boredom.” – Paulo Coelho

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.” – Neil Gaiman

“You can’t waste time, only yourself.” – Shane Parrish

“When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

“The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.” – Samuel Butler

“We can be bought, but we can’t be bored.” – Lynn Fontanne

“Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.” – Bertrand Russell

“The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.” – Nancy Astor

Bored Relationship Quotes

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“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

“I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.” – Søren Kierkegaard

“He is really wise who is nettled at nothing.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

“Happiness is loving the boring days.” – Thibaut

“Greatness is consistency. Meditating once is common. Meditating daily is rare. Exercising today is simple. Training every week is simply remarkable. Writing one essay doesn’t mean much. Writing every day practically makes you a hero. Unheroic days can make for heroic decades.” – James Clear

“He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.” – Dylan Thomas

“Entertainment becomes boring if not constrained.” – Angela Jiang

“Dullness doesn’t sell ads, so the media manufactures a continuous stream of outrage to fill the void.” – Elaine Ou

“Doing drugs is just a war with boredom.” – Mac Miller

“I can stand defeats, pain, anger. But I can’t stand boredom.” – Paulo Coelho

“Get bored with your past, it’s over!” – Caroline Myss

“Facebook is like the fridge. If you’re bored, keep opening it.”

“Doing boring things without getting bored is a competitive advantage.” – Shane Parrish

“Be bored and see where it takes you because the imagination’s dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.” – Nancy Gibbs

“And I’m not as young as I once was. At my age, I don’t have time to be bored.” – Lev Grossman

“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.” – Andy Warhol

“When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.” – Eric Hoffer

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Dorothy Parker

“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” – Vincent Van Gogh

“You have to evolve. Stagnation breeds boredom.” – Matt Bellamy

Boredom Strikes Quotes

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“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men… of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.” – Bertrand Russell

“Do not get bored with the process.” – Erik Spoelstra

“I think it’s necessary to let kids get bored once in a while – that’s how they learn to be creative.” – Kim Raver

“Decrease dopamine dependency. Bring back boredom.” – Anthony Pompliano

“Boring progress compounds into exceptional results.” – Shane Parrish

“Being bored is an insult to oneself.”

“Be warned: I’m bored. This could get dangerous.”

“Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.” – Blaise Pascal

“I tried to be good but then I got bored.”

“Loneliness is cured by contact with yourself.” – Sven Schnieders

“It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than be absolutely boring.” – Marilyn Monroe

“It is fatal to know too much at the outset. Boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as the novelist who is over certain of his plot.” – Paul Theroux

“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” – David Bowie

“Being bored is boring.”

“All solutions of boredom, become boredom.” – Kunal Shah

“Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?” – Emile M. Cioran

“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.

“I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” – Richard Feynman

“Do you know that in a universe so full of wonders they have managed to invent boredom.” – Terry Pratchett

“Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.” – Renata Adler

“I was really bored and unhappy in school, and I used to act out and do horrible things.” – Christina Ricci

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