Dullness Quotes

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

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl in Blue

“What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ("Give me more images")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“When life is foggy, path is unclear and mind is dull, remember your breath. It has the power to give you the peace. It has the power to resolve the unsolved equations of life.”
― Amit Ray, Beautify your Breath - Beautify your Life

“One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?"

[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)]”
― Ken Kesey

“I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.

there's nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us”
― Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

“Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn

“For some there is no music
No lights
No fire
No untamed madness that breathes life
There is work
Anguish
Frustration
Rage
Despair
A dullness that rings like wooden thunder”
― Henry Rollins

“Love from novels isn't true love: it ends where it should begin. True love, deep love, grows up with time, throughout days of dullness and days of storms. It leaves in one's heart a rainbow of tenderness and forgiveness which illuminates forever the beloved one.”
― Gabrielle Dubois

“Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?”
― William Makepeace Thackeray

“- What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world to have a soft time and what is it? Float on flowery beds of ease? Think Man was just made to be happy?

- Why not? Though I've never discovered anybody that knew what the deuce Man really was made for!

- Well, we know not just in the Bible alone, but it stands to reason a man who doesn't buckle down and do his duty, even if it does bore him sometimes, is nothing but a... well, he's simply a weakling. Mollycoddle, in fact! And what do you advocate? Come down to cases! If a man is bored by his wife, do you seriously mean he has a right to chuck her and take a sneak, or even kill himself?

- Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

“Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“الضجر والنفور كأسلوب حياة يليق بهيبة متخفية لشجرة”
― Eman Herzallah

“You sometimes hear about people who have lost their sense of smell and taste: for those people, a plate of the most delicious food means nothing at all. That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, otherwise I would die, but I had lost my appetite.”
― Herman Koch, The Dinner

“[I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!”
― Mary Roberts Rinehart, Writing Is Work

“Fornication and adultery unleash destructive consequences into a person's life:
• Poverty;
• Lack of perception;
• Loss of respect and mutual acceptance;
• Children with shattered futures;
• Dullness of the senses and of the intellect;
• Deterioration of health.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“You talk of beauty, love, laughter and life like a precious memory. As if the sunshine of love and laughter shall never flow into your life again. You make it sound like your present and future shall promise you nothing but safety and comfort in a sort of dead, dull way. What killed the spirit of madness, the spark of adventure and the sense of delicious fun ? Your aliveness ? Is this what it is to get old ?”
― Srividya Srinivasan

“الحقيقة هي أن الأوغاد وحدهم يشعرون بأنهم في وطنهم على هذه الأرض”
― Markus Werner, On the Edge

“Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life'; banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“Going to bed and waking in the morning (I woke, most often, too early) were bad times—so many hundreds of evenings and mornings. Sometimes I wondered who or what sends us this senseless repetition of days and nights and seasons and years; is it not like hearing a stupid boy whistle the same tune over and over, till you wonder how he can bear it himself?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“One has to be dull to feel happy amongst the dull!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“For the strange thing is that Scott-King was definitely blasé. Something of the kind has been hinted before, yet, seeing him cross the quadrangle to the chapel steps, middle-aged, shabby, unhonoured and unknown, his round and learned face puckered against the wind, you would have said: ‘There goes a man who has missed all the compensations of life—and knows it.’ But that is because you do not yet know Scott-King; no voluptuary surfeited by conquest, no colossus of the drama bruised and rent by doting adolescents, not Alexander, nor Talleyrand, was more blasé than Scott-King. He was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet; he was travel-worn in the large periphery of his own mind, jaded with accumulated experience of his imagination. He was older, it might have been written, than the rocks on which he sat; older, anyway, than his stall in chapel; he had died many times, had Scott-King, had dived deep, had trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. And all this had been but the sound of lyres and flutes to him.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Scott-King's Modern Europe

“Disappointment, fear, grief, unlove, dullness and guilt are the worst feelings. Learn from them so that you move on. Then replace them with more satisfying and promising joy, love gratitude, pride, confidence, direction.”
― Diana Jaber

“Yet, even the nicest places on earth become boring in due course. The greatest moments become dull and tedious once the flame of excitement ceases to burn.”
― Wiss Auguste, The Illusions of Hope

“Believing is so relative, sometimes i find it dull.”
― Alain Bremond-Torrent, running is flying intermittently

“Now, watching Alexei Afanasievich through the keen diopters of her dozing trance, Nina Alexandrovna understood deep down that an unnatural death, be it murder or suicide, was all about physical objects. You couldn’t do away with yourself without a tool. Virtually anything could be used to kill someone, after which it remained here, as innocent as ever and undiminished. Meanwhile, the everyday objects in this room (muffled by dispassionate philosophical dust) contained very little death; their shapes were too smooth, their corners too wooden; their harmless dullness could drive anyone to despair.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Sluggish minds don't invent ideas, they invent philosophies.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words