What are the best quotes about boredom?

Most boredom quotes online are trimmed, tidied or pinned on the wrong person. So we went back to the books. Every line below was checked word for word on 1 October 2026 against the original text, either a scanned or transcribed edition (Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive) or, for the two modern translations, a Wikiquote entry that cites the edition and page. Where a writer did not write in English, we name the translator, because the words are the translator’s.

Anything we could not trace to its source, we left out.

What did philosophers say about boredom?

The philosophers mostly agree: boredom is what is left when distraction runs out, and it is not trivial.

1. “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées no. 139, written c. 1657-1658, translated by W. F. Trotter.^[1]
2. “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study.” Pascal, Pensées no. 131, Trotter translation.^[1]
3. “The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.” Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843), “Rotation of Crops”, translated by Howard and Edna Hong. The same passage opens by calling boredom “the root of all evil”.^[2]
4. “…the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life, from Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), translated by T. Bailey Saunders.
5. “For the thinker and for all inventive spirits ennui is the unpleasant ‘calm’ of the soul which precedes the happy voyage and the dancing breezes.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (1882), section 42, translated by Thomas Common (1910).

Pascal’s point is sharper than the paraphrase suggests. He is not praising quiet rooms. He is saying we cannot bear them, and that most of our busyness is a way of not finding out why.

What did Bertrand Russell say about boredom?

More than anyone else on this list. Chapter 4 of The Conquest of Happiness (1930) is called “Boredom and Excitement”, and it reads as if it were written about phones.^[3]

6. “Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another.”
7. “The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.”
8. “Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.”
9. “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.”
10. “…a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature…”

The last line continues, in the original, with an image of people withering “as though they were cut flowers in a vase”. It is the closest thing this list has to a thesis, and it is the reason we make How to Be Bored Again.

What did writers say about boredom?

The writers were kinder to the bored, and harder on the boring.

11. “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.” G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905).^[4] This is the source of the shorter version, “there are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people”, which is a fair summary but not his wording.
12. “Society is now one polish’d horde, / Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.” Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII (1823). Chesterton quotes Byron’s division of humanity in the very next lines of Heretics.
13. “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936), translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations (1968), p. 91.

If you want the science behind Benjamin’s dream bird, our piece on what boredom does to your brain covers it.

What are short quotes about slowing down?

These are the ones that fit on a card or a fridge:

14. “I love a broad margin to my life.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), “Sounds”.^[5]
15. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”.^[5]
16. “What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare.” W. H. Davies, “Leisure”, first published in Songs of Joy and Others (1911).
17. “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day … is by no means waste of time.” John Lubbock, The Use of Life (1894), chapter 4, “Recreation”. (The cut words describe the murmur of water and clouds crossing the sky.)
18. “Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers”, collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881).

For the practice rather than the poetry, see what slow living actually is.

What are the best quotes about stillness?

Three old ones, all public domain:

19. “Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.” Laozi, Tao Te Ching, chapter 15, translated by James Legge (1891). The brackets are Legge’s own additions.
20. “Nor less I deem that there are powers, / Which of themselves our minds impress, / That we can feed this mind of ours, / In a wise passiveness.” William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”, Lyrical Ballads (1798).
21. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10, King James Version (1611).

Which famous boredom quotes are misattributed?

Two well-known ones, both traced by the researcher Garson O’Toole at Quote Investigator:

• “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Usually credited to Dorothy Parker. The earliest known appearance is in Reader’s Digest in December 1980, credited to Ellen Parr. Parker died in 1967, and the likely cause of the mix-up is alphabetical quote lists placing Parker directly above Parr.^[6]
• “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” Usually credited to Vincent van Gogh. The line comes from Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames, spoken by the character Octave Mouret. Van Gogh quoted it in a letter to his brother Theo in 1884.^[7]

Two more are not wrong so much as reworded: the Pascal line about sitting “quietly in a room alone” is a modern paraphrase of no. 139 above, and the Chesterton line is a shortened version of the one in Heretics.

What are funny short “I’m bored” quotes?

Three old ones that still land, each checked word for word on 2 October 2026 against the original text:

22. “BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).^[8]
23. “There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do.” Jerome K. Jerome, “On Being Idle”, in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886).^[9]
24. “Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.” Jerome, the same essay.^[9]

Byron’s “the Bores and Bored” (no. 12 above) is the other classic for a caption. The caveat: most of the snappy “I’m bored” lines on Instagram and WhatsApp status lists have no traceable author, so we have left them out. If you want a name under your quote, use one of these.

Is idle time the devil’s playground?

No, not on the evidence, though the idea is very old. Its root is usually traced to St Jerome, who advised a young monk in AD 411: “Always have some work on hand, that the devil may find you busy.”^[10] Isaac Watts set it to verse for children in 1715: “For Satan finds some Mischief still / For idle Hands to do.”^[11] The “devil’s workshop” and “devil’s playground” versions are later rewordings; we could not trace the “playground” wording to a dated first use, so we do not give one.

What research suggests is subtler. Idle time is uncomfortable: across 11 studies published in 2014, participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes alone with nothing to do but think, and many chose to give themselves mild electric shocks instead.^[12] The caveat is that discomfort is not wickedness. The proverb gets the itch right and the conclusion wrong, and our piece on what boredom does to your brain covers what can happen when you sit with it.

Why do people keep quoting about boredom?

Because every generation thinks it invented the problem. Pascal blamed hunting and war, Russell worried that “too much travel, too much variety of impressions” left the young unable to endure monotony, and we blame the phone. The quotes last because the feeling does. What they share is a quiet suggestion that boredom is not an emergency to be fixed, but a doorway.

If you would like some lines on the wall, The Quiet Quotes Print Set is twelve typographic prints of lines from our own book, ready to frame.