"Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness."
—Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1670

"Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always."
—Guy Debord, The Incomplete Works of the Situationist International, 1963

"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."
—Thomas Carlyle

"The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean—when boredom seems the very stuff of life."
—Henry Miller

"As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it’s a bore."
—Henry Brooks Adams, letter, December 17, 1908

"Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom."
—Arthur Schopenhauer

"It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom."
—Wallace Stevens

"Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. —A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation."
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 1880

"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890

"Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings."
—Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1843