c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Why didn't Jacob simply refuse to go along with this bold, obvious swindle? Again, Robert Alter's insights are invaluable. When Jacob asks, 'Why have you DECEIVED me?' the Hebrew word is the same one used in chapter 27 to describe what Jacob did to Isaac. Alter then quotes an ancient rabbinical commentator who imagines the conversation the next day between Jacob and Leah. Jacob says to Leah: 'I called out "Rachel" in the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to me?' And Leah says to him, 'Your father called out "Esau" in the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to him?' His fury dies on his lips. He sees what it is like to be manipulated and deceived, and he meekly complies with Laban's offer.
— Timothy J. Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters
Corporate advertising is simply expensive lying dressed up as brainwashing
— Dean Cavanagh
I try not to take things lying down, especially rectal thermometers
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
Not telling everything you know is not the same as telling a lie.
— Glenda Bailey-Mershon, Eve's Garden
Pretending is another way of lying, and I am so good at both.
— Kiersten White, Mind Games
Why are you lying to me? I'm so tired of people lying to me. Do I not deserve the truth? Do I look like someone who can't handle it?
— Kasie West, Split Second
having someone who likes you so much that they think everything you say is the truth has got to be a liar’s paradise
— Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
— Rex Stout, Before Midnight
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
— Jerome K. Jerome
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
— Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest
Liars are exhausting people.
— Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
She lied to me today," Archie said."A teenager?" Susan said with faux surprise. "Lying to an authority figure? Impossible.
— Chelsea Cain, Kill You Twice
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
— J.B. Priestley
Well." Wolfe was judicious. "You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is highly valued and frequently exercised.
— Rex Stout, Before Midnight
The lie detector didn’t react to anything I said, but I wouldn’t dare smile.
— Embee, Tess Embers
By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: "I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning. 
— Sam Harris
Are you okay?” someone asked.	“I’m fine,” I snapped, turning to face Jayden Griffin.	“I have to admit, you’re getting better at lying, Tess Embers,” he said quietly. “However, I know you’re not okay.
— Embee, Tess Embers
That’s not necessary,” Mr. Bradshaw said, “although you are all perfectly welcome in the guest rooms upstairs, I won’t ask you to lie to your-”	“Mr. Bradshaw.” Nathan grinned. “You’ve been asking us to lie to our parents from the moment we each set foot in this house. We’re spies; we’ll all find excuses to stay here. No one wants to leave the only place in the city where the Pentagon won’t dare enter. Not tonight. Not after what happened.
— Embee, Tess Embers
Do we really need a study on why people lie? They lie because it's easy, and cowards are good at "easy." Telling the truth takes moxie, and few have it.
— Donna Lynn Hope
If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie.
— Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room
There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.
— Stephen King, Needful Things
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
— Otto von Bismarck
Do What?' 'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?''Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.'I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.
— Alan Bradley, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
There's a very thin difference between lying and breaking the promise.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren't doing so well in class are at even higher risk - students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adam speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students' grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams.
— Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves
Euphemisms persist because lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.
— Bergen Evans
The one undeniable benefit of having spent some time in the closet is that it nurtures a talent that you can fall back on any time: lying convincingly. Sometimes I worried that queer kids in the twenty-first century coming out at twelve, or even younger, would never develop that valuable skill.
— Bob     Smith, Remembrance of Things I Forgot
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
— Sam Harris, Lying
Were you lying?""I never lie," he said piously. "About what?""The sand, the snake."For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.
— Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
The biggest liar in the world is They Say.
— Douglas Malloch
A lie carries a weight that is exponentially higher than the truth. It’s weight will retard growth directly in proportion to the area lied.
— Howard L. Salter
Tell me it's not true."He sighed. "Fine. It's not true."...And yet..."Are you lying?"He rolled his eyes. "Of course I'm lying.""Not cool." I muttered.Kyle shrugged. "I didn't want you to start hyperventilating again." His hair fell over his eyes and he brushed it aside. "I figured annoying you was safer than admitting anything.
— Kathleen Peacock, Hemlock
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
— Sam Harris
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them
— Stacia Kane
I lied," I said. ..."I know it," he said."Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.""I cant," he said."There aint anything to do? Not anything?""I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can.""What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to.""You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable.""Then what can I do?""Live with it," Grandfather said."Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see that I cant?""Yes you can," he said. "You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should.
— William Faulkner, The Reivers
Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.
— Winston S. Churchill
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
— Mark Twain, On the Decay of the Art of Lying
Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?" Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely's that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you must be doing, and - having lied to themselves on your behalf - are disinclined to check up on you.
— Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker
Resorting to lying or cheating in any competition amounts to conceding defeat.
— George Hammond
Oh, the unintended consequences of perfidy!
— Andrew Levkoff, A Mixture of Madness
Just … isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
A true writer does not seek wealth or fame does seek to find himself in each of his readers souls.
— Julia Joanne Black
As a writer, self-doubt is useless. Get rid of it, rip it out like a weed and compost it.
— Julie Rodelli
How are you going do your writings? How can the others understand you through words describing places, sensations, thoughts, feelings, hope, love, separations on a maze of phrases and paragraphs cemented with your ability to 'knit' your story? Maybe, 'how' is more relevant to provide for your readers a consistent path to build a story from the beginning to the end than 'what' and 'why'. Of course, you are not going to dismiss them. These ones – 'what' and 'why' –, they are pretty damn good too.
— Frederick Vanderbuilt
From centuries ago before the dawn of civilization, I have been wandering. I am the wanderer. I can't stay at one place. I am destined to wander from place to place!And I keep wandering in search of a nothingness. The river embraces me and guides me to swim inside her and to drink the nectar of love from her bosom. She tells me her secrets and I tell her mine. She makes me sensitive and soft.The mountain greets me with respect and guides me to traverse the rocks and crevices of its body! He is strong and vigorous and he appreciates my stamina and toughness.After dusk in the night, the stars smile at me and they show me light to travel in the darkness. They tell me their stories and I tell them mine.The moon embalms me with her love and she kisses me good night. The nightingale sings her song of love when I take rest in the arms of darkness in the night!And after the dawn of the morning, the sun greets me and acknowledges my spirit and strength!I am the wanderer and I keep wandering in search of a nothingness.I am the wanderer and wandering is my destiny!
— Avijeet Das
In the writers mind, even a backstory has a backstory.
— Terry a O'Neal
Almost as a rule, political dissidents were writers.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
A book is like a trip to a world of imagination and creativity, and those who don’t read will for ever stay in the same place.
— Dulce Rodrigues
Write for a cause,NOT APPLAUSEWrite to express,NOT TO IMPRESS.Writing isn’t just about being noticed…IT'S BEING REMEMBERED
— T.N. Suarez
I believe the best reviews are any of those wherein readers share their true opinion, no matter how many stars they rate my work. When I receive responses from appreciative people thanking for useful and amusing reading, it feels like my wings stretch up and blood carries the highest happiness circulating in my veins. I think many writers will understand what I mean by that.
— Sahara Sanders
If I'm not a writer, who am I?
— Jacquelyn Middleton, London Belongs to Me
Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work. It's about the writer you're becoming while writing.
— T.N. Suarez
Write until your idea becomes reality.
— T.N. Suarez
Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work.It’s about the writer you’re becoming while creating
— T.N. Suarez
The worst reviews, by my mind, are those from individuals who enjoy entertaining themselves by writing something bad about books they actually never read, which is as clear as day from what they’re saying. It’s even more puzzling for an author to check some of these “honest” reviewers’ pages and see that they created their profile with one goal in mind; to post you a bad review, as there’s nothing else they wanted to rate.
— Sahara Sanders
A writer observes you far sharply than others and therefore you find your traits in a book.
— Arvind Parashar
Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.
— Sarah Colliver
Ugh, writer's block. The best thing to do is to forget about everything you're trying to do. Get away from your writing station, kick your feet up and relax. Then allow your mind to just wander. Don't stop it. Just let yourself think of anything, no mater how silly the thoughts seem. Remember, not to judge these thoughts. This will open up your creative receptors. You'll begin to think outside the box. Then the good stuff will start racing through you. That's when you start writing!
— La Tisha Honor
What they failed to understand was that a creative person can never restrict himself/herself within a particular time-frame. I was no longer a school-going boy. The writer in me revolted – I started to voice my likes and dislikes.
— Deepak Ranjan, Nights of the Velvet: A Conditional Dream
I want to paint the way a bird sings.
— Claude Monet, Monet By Himself
I write because I want express
— Anamika Mishra
Writer's block: when your imaginary friends stop talking to you.
— Anonymous
Write the masterpiece that has not been written.Sing the masterpiece that has not been sung.Paint the masterpiece that has not been painted.Create the masterpiece that has not been created.
— Matshona Dhliwayo
After writing, there is the letting go part. Perfection is a myth; as we all get better by day.Allow yourself to grow in active practice, release that book to the world, and do better with the next one.
— Uma Nnenna
Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each piece fits in.
— Uma Nnenna
They wouldn't have picked you to tell their story if you weren't the one.
— N.E. Henderson
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
— André Gide
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” -
— E.L. Doctorow
you don't have to be great to get started but you have to to get started to be great
— Les Brown
Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's
I close my eyes and think of what might be possible. And, in my mind, I see fireworks over the Hudson.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
That moment when a knot forms in your throat, but you choose to throw your head back and laugh instead.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Wear yourself proudly.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Be what you are, all that you are. Wear yourself proudly. It will require that you draw a line, but that line in the sand is your courage.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Airport bars are more like film sets, the bathrooms reminiscent of dormitories. Everyone is waiting to go somewhere, suspended in nowhere...
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Today like yesterday and the day before that, I will strive to achieve what tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, I have tried!
— Leslie Austin, A Fox Called Woff
Trying to get an agent is like standing in line to be picked for kickball. Pick me! Pick me! ...Dang, last again.
— Buffy Andrews
I am so over you, Rejection. You can't get to me like that anymore. I won't let you squash my hopes and dreams. (Slams door) So there!
— Buffy Andrews
If rejections were cash, I'd be rich
— Buffy Andrews
She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.
— Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings
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
The Beatles saved the world from boredom.
— George Harrison
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.
— Joseph Brodsky
I am never bored
—  to be bored is an insult to one's self.
We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars.
— David Bottoms
Boredom comes from a boring mind.
— Metallica
When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.
— Eric Hoffer
Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
— David Foster Wallace
Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.
— Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson
You've already said you were going to kill me," Alex said, "but I didn't think that meant you were going to bore me to death.
— Anthony Horowitz, Point Blank
We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Well, if you weren't flirting with him"-his voice had now grown a little plaintive-"who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?""If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home." Astrid sighed carelessly, "What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress.
— Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things
You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.
— Andy Warhol
My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.
— Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.
— G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions
I always think boredom is to some extent the fault of the bored.
— Kate Ross, Cut to the Quick
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.
— William Inge
If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.
— Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson
I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then… and then what? By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again. I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.
— Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson
When you feel bored, pump your adrenaline!
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Boredom is the price one pays for not enjoying everything.
— Marty Rubin
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
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays
Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.
— Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love
A utopia cannot, by deﬁnition, include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring.
— Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair--or the height of a battle against boredom.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
Boredom, that traitorous devil that posseses us to do things sometimes useless, and often stupid.
— Apol Lejano-Massebieau
Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
— Anton Chekhov, Ivanov
Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
— Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky
Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.
— Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
One mood can be replaced by another, but it is impossible to leave attunement altogether. However, profound boredom brings us as close to a state of un-attunement as we can come.
— Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.
— Thomas Mann, Tristan
Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.
— Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!
— Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
Boredom is a flight from what is important. Like workaholism and perfectionism, it is a way of distracting yourself from inner experiences. It occurs when you look outward and do not find anything to engage your attention. Instead of feeling your emotions - becoming aware of the functioning of your energy system - you become bored. Boredom ... is a flight from your higher potential. It is fear of the transformation that wants to occur, and will occur in you, when you explore your emotions. It is your resistance to spiritual growth.
— Gary Zukav, The Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness
That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struffle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy.
— Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.
— Hilary Spurling, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time
Time,Crawling so slowly, numbing our minds,Boredom, lack of ambition, lost.Passion and it speeds along.The fire burns again.Time,Fast and filled.With passion, no matter how fast time flies away,I am content.Alive.
— Avina Celeste
And allow me again to assure you that when you've got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won't find you have any time to get bored.
— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
All men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
She would not tell him the truth for some weeks, but she would eventually confess that she had left with him because the fear had gone out of her daily leaps. Her hours were filled with confident, minor feats and toothless dangers. She would not call it such, but Adam would later name it for her: it was boredom that had driven her from her mother’s side and a secure home.
— Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends
The nature of the mind is to acquire, to absorb, is it not? Or rather the pattern it has created for itself is one of gathering in, and in that very activity the mind is preparing its own weariness, boredom. Interst, curiosity, is the beginning of acquisition, wich soon becomes boredom; and the urge to be free from boredom is another form of possession. So the mingd goes from boredom to interest to boredom again, til it is utterly weary; and these successive waves of interest and weariness are regarded as existence. "Commentaries on Living, Series II
— Jiddhu Krsihnamurti
Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.
— Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays
Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.
— Javier Marías, To Begin at the Beginning
He exhaled in disgust. “High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.
— Katie Kennedy, Learning to Swear in America
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches. Imagine a modern American publisher confronted with the Old Testament as a new manuscript submitted to him for the first time. It is not difficult to think what his comments would be, for example, on the genealogies. 'My dear sir,' he would say, 'this chapter lacks pep; you can't expect your reader to be interested in a mere string of proper names of persons about whom you tell so little. You have begun your story, I admit, in fine style, and at first I was very favourably impressed, but you have altogether too much wish to tell it all. Pick out the highlights, take out the superfluous matter, and bring me back your manuscript when you have reduced it to a reasonable length.' So the modern publisher would speak, knowing the modern reader's fear of boredom.
— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Just lay down on the beach, with nothing intellectual or constructive to do , other than soaking in the sun, and listening to the refreshing sounds of the water waves and admiring the smiles of the ́near and dear ́ ones that we love.
— Tina Sequeira, SOUL SOJOURN
All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.
— K.W. Jeter, Infernal Devices
Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else in some other way, in some other world; weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.
— Pessoa Fernando
Boredom can be just another construct of the mind....There is always something new to notice.
— Ellen Langer, Mindfulness
The more time you have to do things, the less you are able to get done.
— Joyce Rachelle
She said: “I’m so sick of this joint.”“Why?”“No freedom. I can’t go out. I can’t get drunk or gamble or wear swell clothes…”“They look swell to me.”“Shut up, honey. I’m trying to tell you something. I like to dance. I like good restaurants and night clubs, and movies. Here all I’m supposed to do is think about God. It’s getting me down.”“You don’t like God?”“I can take him or leave him.”I laughed.
— Jonathan Latimer, Solomon's Vineyard
Suppose boredom is a backstairs to liberation — insignificant, and so often overlooked. No one who has not known its higher degrees can claim to have lived. Not the Relative Boredom of long waiting at junctions for railway connections on the way to visit friends—or the rashly accepted week-end with acquaintances—the reviewing of a dull book. In such Relative Boredom the "wasting-of-time"-feeling only heightens the enjoyment of the coming escape, the anticipation of which sustains us meanwhile. Absolute Boredom is rather the pain of nausea, it is the loss of one's livelihood as for the pianist who loses his hands, the unsatiable desire for what we know makes us sick, it is the Great Drought, the "Carnal physic for the sick soul", the Dark Night of the Soul after the climbing of Mount Carmel, it is the pillar of salt, the exile from the land which is no more, the Sin against the Holy Ghost, the break-up of patterns, the horror that waits alone in the night, the entry into the desert where Death mocks by serving one one's daily food and one cannot bear hut to keep the darkness of one's own shadow before one for the very brightness of the light that reveals the universal emptiness. Do not try to turn back now — here in the desert perhaps there are doors open—in the cool woods they are overgrown, and in the busy cities they have built over them.
— Nanamoli Thera
Boredom is that agitated space between relaxation and action; dialed down, it can become a pleasant kind of inertia or a meditative stillness, where it feels good to sit quietly with your own thoughts; cranked up a notch, it can produce creative release. But that middle place is the boredom itself – restlessness with no movement. A dull and desperate longing for something else. From Catastrophic Happiness.
— Catherine Newman, Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood's Messy Years
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
By dinnertime, Amanda had managed to pick off all of her red nail polish purely out of habit. She was disappointed and silently cursed at herself when she remembered not having anymore to put on. She stared at her fingernails for about twenty minutes for lack of something better to do.
— Jason Medina, No Hope for the Hopeless at Kings Park
And besides, I couldn't stay at the party. It was too dangerous. I nearly died.""From what?""Boredom.
— Jennifer Donnelly, These Shallow Graves
Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
Make a plan & Use the time when you're thinking about "what to do when your bored
— Rabin Mahmud
There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as 'whole person conversation'—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness.
— Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
Boredom is a form of evil; perhaps one of Kierkegaard's characters was more correct when he said, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Boredom is a preview of death, if not itself a form of death, and when trapped in prolonged boredom, even the most saintly of us will hope for, pray for, or even engineer relief, however demonic.
— Fred B. Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel: Revised and Expanded Edition
This is what a place like this does to you. It makes you put words in the beaks of chickens.
— Danielle  Paige, No Place Like Oz
I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.
— Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite.
— Søren Kierkegaard
What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable.
— Rick Moody
Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.‘It’s not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,’ Keep-on-Dancin’ asserted. ‘The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn’t so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they’re scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They’d do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don’t forget, it’s with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other.
— Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City
When people say they're unemployed, bored, or have nothing to do, I sigh and think, "If only time were transferable.
— Joyce Rachelle
—fear comes only when you don’t have faith in the outcome. And boredom comes only when you believe there’s nothing new worth learning. I simply can’t understand how any of that will occur today.
— Trish Mercer, The Falcon in the Barn
Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
We're dying of boredom, Corporal, that's the problem.' [Blend] 'If boredom was fatal there wouldn't be a soldier alive on this whole world, Blend.' [Picker]
— Stephen Erickson
But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me --and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.
— Thomas Mann
To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.
— Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual
I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life
— Frank O'Hara
Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.
— H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
When you are bored of the plains, the secret passages to the mountains suddenly appear out of nowhere before you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.
— Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual
and now i am back in the grey world where it tastes like plastic, the monotony is buzzing through my jaws and the boredom is pulling my hair.
— Anna Jae
I truly believe that the boredom of illness is parlous to one's health
— Tyne O'Connell
It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
— Helen Keller
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
Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.
— Bohumil Hrabal, Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp: An Interview-Novel with Questions Asked and Answers Recorded by László Szigeti
Darling, I'm so unutterably bored as to be a hazard
— Tyne O'Connell, Pulling Princes
You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
— Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City
She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow.
— D.H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy
Don't be afraid to let yourself get bored because some of the most amazing things are created through boredom.
— Rachel Hamilton