25 Quotes on Being Bored and Why Our Modern Reaction To “Fix It” Is Wrong

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Excerpt: …Bored? Instead of running from boredom, you should learn how to embrace it. Read our 25 quotes on being bored and find out why.

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Introduction: Optimize For Boredom

One thing the most prolific among us do differently is they optimize for boredom.

See, in today’s world, there seems to be two default states for the modern person: busy or bored.

And those who are bored, most often, find ways they can quickly make themselves busy—typically through unimportant busywork, passive entertainment, and social media.

But, those who can reprogram their mind to see boredom as something different… something to be sought out… something to be carefully guarded… something to be planned for…

Get to spend more time in that non-busy state… undistracted and unbothered… uninfluenced and unhindered… un-marketed-to and un-prodded…

…So they can more freely explore ideas on their own.

…So they can sort through the infinite depth of what’s already there.

…So they can imaginatively play as they once did when they were at their creative height(s).

So they can become a prolific example of what it means to be an independent, uniquely capable, creatively abundant, infinitely potentialed human in a world of ever present and ever increasing carbon copies and A.I. regurgitations.

Those who are too busy flooding their minds with everything else never get a chance to sort through it all and actually decide.

Below, you will find 16 quotes on being bored from people who will show you the power in fully embracing your bored moments—so that you can start sorting through it all and more appropriately deciding. Good luck!

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The List: 25 Quotes on Being Bored and Why Our Modern Reaction To “Fix It” Is Wrong

“Life is never boring, but some people choose to be bored, boredom is a choice.”

Unknown

“To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”

Unknown

“There are no uninteresting things; there are only uninterested people.”

Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust

“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment – from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies – how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”

Alan Watts, The Book

“‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless. The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’”

Louis CK

“Why does one feel bored? One feels bored because one has been living in dead patterns given to you by others. Renounce those patterns, come out of those patterns! Start living on your own.”

Osho, Courage (Page 168)

“If you want to cure boredom, be curious. If you’re curious, nothing is a chore; it’s automatic – you want to study. Cultivate curiosity, and life becomes an unending study of joy.”

Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

Albert Einstein

“It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.”

Gaston Bachelard, via Sunbeams (Page 117)

“Boredom is nearly always essential to creativity. It isn’t true that creativity is mostly sparked by having a specific problem to be solved. It’s far more likely to arise because the person is bored with the way something has been done a thousand times before and wants to try something new.  Boredom stimulates the search for better ways to things like nothing else does.”

Adrian Savage, Life Hack

“My aunt and uncle in their country home taught me how to be okay with sitting still, a quality that has been as important to my career as anything. To be a decent writer, you have to be okay with either writing or doing absolutely nothing. I’m a firm believer that the only way to be creative is to sit around and do nothing until you get bored enough to entertain yourself.”

Cole Schafer

“Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.”

Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“Somebody who thinks they’re nothing and don’t matter because they’re not doing something for even a few days is depriving themselves of stillness, yes—but they are also closing themselves off from a higher plane of performance that comes out of it.”

Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 189)

“Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

“The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

“Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents—will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?”

Robert Greene, Mastery

“A person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper, who comes last to be unable even to taste a quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty.”

Bertrand Russell

“There’s more stimulation, more options and more noise than ever before. The problem is that boredom is a partner with satisfaction and joy. It’s hard to overstimulate ourselves into those feelings.”

Seth Godin, Blog

“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems.”

Unknown

“When we condition our minds to run away from boring, quiet, slow, difficult, thought-provoking moments, we’ve conditioned them to avoid the very moments that are required to make books, art, music, science and code.”

Cole Schafer

“You try being alone, without any form of distraction, and you will see how quickly you want to get away from yourself and forget what you are. That is why this enormous structure of professional amusement, of automated distraction, is so prominent a part of what we call civilization. If you observe, you will see that people the world over are becoming more and more distracted, increasingly sophisticated and worldly. The multiplication of pleasures, the innumerable books that are being published, the newspaper pages filled with sporting events—surely, all these indicate that we constantly want to be amused. Because we are inwardly empty, dull, mediocre, we use our relationships and our social reforms as a means of escaping from ourselves. I wonder if you have noticed how lonely most people are? And to escape from loneliness we run to temples, churches, or mosques, we dress up and attend social functions, we watch television, listen to the radio, read, and so on… If you inquire a little into boredom you will find that the cause of it is loneliness. It is in order to escape from loneliness that we want to be together, we want to be entertained, to have distractions of every kind: gurus, religious ceremonies, prayers, or the latest novel. Being inwardly lonely we become mere spectators in life; and we can be the players only when we understand loneliness and go beyond it… because beyond it lies the real treasure.”

J. Krishnamurti, Think On These Things, via Sunbeams (Page 3)

“Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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