Boredom Quotes - page 8
Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. The same sort of thing applies to music lessons. Human beings have certain capacities for spontaneous enjoyment, but moralists and pedants possess themselves of the apparatus of these enjoyments, and having extracted what they consider the poison of pleasure they leave them dreary and dismal and devoid of everything that gives them value. Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him.
Bertrand Russell
Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of it's own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.
Colin Wilson
What excited me was the recognition that this was simply another version of the problem that had obsessed me all of my life -- the problem of those moments when life seems entirely delightful, when we experience a sensation of what G. K. Chesterton called "absurd good news." Life normally strikes most of us as hard, dull and unsatisfying; but in these moments, consciousness seems to glow and expand, and all the contradictions seem to be resolved. Which of the two visions is true? My own reflections had led me to conclude that the vision of "absurd good news" is somehow broader and more comprehensive than the feeling that life is dull, boring and meaningless. Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one?
Colin Wilson
When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness' . . . because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity . . . And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.
Colin Wilson
Or when people break up, they always use a bunch of lines on each other, you know, terrible rubbish lies, like "It's not you, it's me, it's me." It's NEVER you, it's always them! You should level with these people! Tell them! "You know that strange sound you used to hear when you were going to sleep? That was me CHEWING the bed, out of sheer boredom! OOOOHH, How I HATE you, I hate you so much it gives me energy! I have to get up early in the morning to hate you because there isn't time enough in the day. Please, GO AWAY!" Or that other BULLSHIT: "I need more space!" People never quantify exactly how much space they really need.. do they? But strangely enough, it always seems to be the exact same height, depth and breadth as you.
Dylan Moran
Dancing, the theatre, society, card-playing, games of chance, horses, women, drinking, traveling, and so on ... are not enough to ward off boredom where intellectual pleasures are rendered impossible by lack of intellectual needs. Thus a peculiar characteristic of the Philistine is a dull, dry seriousness akin to that of animals.
Arthur Schopenhauer
