Michael Williamson > Michael's Quotes

“If you wish to be a writer, write.”
― Epictetus

“I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“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

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

“I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”
― Edward Gorey

“What kind of life can you have in a house without books?”
― Sherman Alexie, Flight

“When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.”
― eric hoffer

“If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Vanity of Existence

“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

“Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt

“Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.”
― Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims

“Boredom is the fear of self.”
― Marie Josephine Suin De Beausacq

“Doing anything when you're bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing. ”
― Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

“I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.”
― Erich Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender

“It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“I always think boredom is to some extent the fault of the bored.”
― Kate Ross, Cut to the Quick

“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”
― Saul Steinberg

“Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been erected to rationality in order to put something in place of the cross: the French Revolution named its goddess reason, the Russians named their Moloch work. But the machine called Europe is running idle: it fills stomachs with fake bread, builds artificial houses with iron paper, the products are bad, the pay meager, and at the end of the six holy work days is the unholy Sunday which one sleeps through out of fear of the great boredom which is infecting Europe. Sunday, the day of idleness, is nowadays a punishment for Christianity, the cities collapse into soulless ruins, nature is just a backdrop for dusty sports. Doing nothing out of principle, my dear, is nowadays the most violent form of revolt.”
― Iwan Goll

“The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Feeling bored is a childish attitude.
You wouldn't feel so if you don't rely
on somebody to change your feeling.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

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

“Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine ― that is, activity ― which could solve it, is seen as odious.
Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw.
Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on.
Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most unmanning.
Eventually, it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing ― a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.”
― Margaret George, The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers

“Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair--or the height of a battle against boredom.”
― B.F. Skinner, Walden Two

“After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.

Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“We all need a technological detox; we need to throw away our phones and computers instead of using them as our pseudo-defence system for anything that comes our way. We need to be bored and not have anything to use to shield the boredom away from us. We need to be lonely and see what it is we really feel when we are. If we continue to distract ourselves so we never have to face the realities in front of us, when the time comes and you are faced with something bigger than what your phone, food, or friends can fix, you will be in big trouble.”
― Evan Sutter, Solitude: How Doing Nothing Can Change the World

“Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.”
― Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom

“One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“What the hell, I don't know, but to me a home in the suburbs is a sort of isolated hell where nothing happens.

[letter to sister Caroline Kerouac Blake, March 14, 1945]”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956