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Is Boredom one of the Greatest

of the Unacknowledged Evils of Human Life?

I think that this feigning, this ceaseless pretence of interest in matters to me supremely boring [namely, school athletics], was what wore me out more than anything else. If the reader will picture himself, unarmed, shut up for thirteen weeks on end, night and day, in a society of fanatical golfers—or, if he is a golfer himself, let him substitute fishermen, theosophists, bimetallists, Baconians, or German undergraduates with a taste for autobiography—who all carry revolvers and will probably shoot him if he ever seems to lose interest in their conversation, he will have an idea of my school life... Never, except in the front line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at Wyvern [his boarding school, Malvern].

C. S. Lewis

To return to the sermons, my recollection of these exercises is of the most acute pain. For thirty years I have not been in a church for other than architectural reasons or to witness a marriage or funeral, and it is partly because I associate them to this day with torture. In Chartres, the Sainte Chapelle, Cologne, Winchester, and the great Hindu temple in Coimbatore, I have traced a vague uneasiness to the thought that I might be trapped by Elder Slauson. To this day, I never sit down to listen to a speech or a lecture without making a mental calculation as to when it will be over. That was the question that was in one’s mind when those terrible sermons began, and one knew, despite whatever resources in optimism on which he might draw, that for all practical purposes they never would be. By half-closing my eyes during a dull lecture, I can to this day see the spare, dark and highly undistinguished features of that Dunwich Township divine. Once when I was eight or nine, my father gave me a dollar watch. According to local lore, they did not last long. For many months I kept mine in the box and carried it only once a month to church. This was not vanity. The sermon was a form of punishment beyond anything that hell had to offer. But it was heaven itself to look at the watch and learn that two or sometimes even three minutes had passed.

John Kenneth Galbraith

In the mornings [as foreign correspondents in Moscow in 1932-33] we thumbed over the day’s newspapers, spelling them out ourselves or with the help of a secretary. They were inconceivably long-winded and flat—enormous, turgid articles about the Five-Year Plan or the collectivisation of agriculture. I used in those days to nourish the hope that the Soviet regime would collapse under the weight of its sheer tedium. No human beings, I would reflect, not even Slavs, could indefinitely sustain this boredom of portentous words, these unillumined sentences meandering down column after column, this endless repetition of the same slogans and propositions. How wrong I was! There is, as I now know, no limit to what contemporary human beings will endure, in what is written, spoken, or visually presented to them, however repetitious, long-winded, and inherently false it may be.

Malcolm Muggeridge

In the eighteenth century Coleridge, in his Biographia Litteraria, had stated one human dilemma—we are naturally lazy and hate having anything to do: but we are easily bored and cannot bear having nothing to do. So we are forever inventing things to do which are equal to nothing. Coleridge notes among such no-things, reading the advertisements in railway waiting rooms, and spitting over a bridge. Everybody can make his own list—playing cards, smoking, watching television—all ways of escaping the intolerable boredom of our own company.

Since universal education taught everyone to read, most of the reading done in our world comes high on that dreary list. Certainly it comes higher than it should on mine. We all do some of it, but this kill-time reading is very enfeebling, if it is the only kind of reading we do, if we never turn to reading for its true purpose, which is to feed our mind on minds richer than our own.

Frank Sheed

Thoughts on Boredom

A bore is a man who has nothing to say and says it anyway.

*

A certain amount of excitement is wholesome, but, like almost everything else, the matter is quantitative. Too little may produce morbid cravings; too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.

Bertrand Russell

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

John Updike

Boredom is a common condition of school teachers as well as children.

John Taylor Gatto

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

Bertrand Russell

A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. People court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom, to be relieved of fear and frustration.

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.

Contrary to what pacifists and other humane person would like to believe, wars, when they break out, tend to be popular. They offer the illusion of an escape from the boredom which is the lot of, particularly, technological man.

Malcolm Muggeridge

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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.

Eric Fromm

Underlying my poor tolerance for boredom lies an even deeper gift or curse: a thirst for meaning. As far back as I can remember, any activity that seemed meaningless to me bored me figuratively—and sometimes even literally—to tears.

M. Scott Peck

If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don’t happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn’t make it interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is.

Fritz Redl

Nothing is as fatiguing as boredom.

*

Nothing is worse for your health than boredom.

*

One can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost.

Josef Pieper

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One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

Mme de Stael

People who bore one another should meet seldom, people who interest one another, often.

C. S. Lewis

Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.

The enlightened person is not easily bored. Nonetheless the enlightened person knows when he or she is being bored and knows for sure when she or he is not. No amount of spectacle or surface glamour should ever persuade you that you are not being bored when, in fact, you are.

Lister Sinclair

*

Those who are now pursuing pleasure are not only fleeing from boredom, but are acutely suffering from it.

Aldous Huxley

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Leo Tolstoy

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Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don’t let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.

R. I. Fitzhenry

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Virtuous people often revenge themselves for the constraints to which they submit by the boredom which they inspire.

Confucius

When a thing bores you do not do it. Do not pursue a fruitless perfection.

Eugène Delacroix

A former female associate of a prestigious Manhattan law-firm said of her work, “At best it’s tedious, and at worst the tedium will kill you. It deadened my senses. I’d go out at lunch and find myself envying people who scooped ice cream for a living. At least they could daydream all day.”

When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving.

Steven Wright

*

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

Eric Hoffer

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