Quotes about bore
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Nicholas Roerich photo

“The symbol was not a mere decorating ornament all over, it bore a very special meaning. Collecting all its images together, we might prove that it is the most extensively spread and ancient one among all the symbols of mankind. No one can claim that it belongs but to one religion or is based on the only one folk-lore. It would be very beneficial to glance at the evolution of human consciousness in its variegated forms.”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

Notes on the Banner of Peace (24 May 1939)
Context: I was asked to collect information where the symbols of our Banner of Peace could be found. It turned out that the symbol of the Holy Trinity has been scattered all over the world. This has been explained in various ways. Some say it means the past, present and future, bound by the ring of eternity. Others find it more palatable to explain it as religion, knowledge and art in the ring of Culture. Obviously there were various explanations already in the ancient times, but the symbol, the sign itself had become fixed all over the world. … You can find it on the ancient icon in Bar depicting St. Nicholas. The same is on the centuries-old image of St. Sergius. It is on the image of Holy Trinity. It is on the coat of arms of Samarkand. It is on ancient Ethiopian and Coptic antiquities. It is on Mongolian rocks. It is on Tibetan rings. The steed of happiness on the Himalayan Mountains passes bears the same flaming sign. It is on all the brooches of Lahuli, Ladakhi and Himalayan Mountains. It is on Buddhist banners. Going back to the Neolithic depths we can find the same sign in the ornaments decorating their pottery. … And that is why the symbol was chose for all uniting Banner as the symbol that has passed through centuries, more exactly — millennia. The symbol was not a mere decorating ornament all over, it bore a very special meaning. Collecting all its images together, we might prove that it is the most extensively spread and ancient one among all the symbols of mankind. No one can claim that it belongs but to one religion or is based on the only one folk-lore. It would be very beneficial to glance at the evolution of human consciousness in its variegated forms.

Henry David Thoreau photo

“A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”

Final lines
Civil Disobedience (1849)
Context: Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

James D. Watson photo

“Never do anything that bores you.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb (1993)
Context: Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I'm not good enough to do something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to do something that I like. … Constantly exposing your ideas to informed criticism is very important, and I would venture to say that one reason both of our chief competitors failed to reach the Double Helix before us was that each was effectively very isolated.

John Buchan photo

“Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)
Context: Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago. It was the hour, as the French say, "between dog and wolf," when the mind is disposed to marvels.

G. K. Chesterton photo

“There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove.”

"The Future of Democracy"
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.

Starhawk photo

“No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it's safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times, your fellow activists.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)
Context: No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it's safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times, your fellow activists. Not only that, it generates enormous feelings of frustration and rage, makes your throat sore from shouting, and hurts your feet.
Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living, conscious being that we're part of, that human beings are interconnected and precious, and that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing.

Bob Black photo

“Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous.”

The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or — better still — industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

Richard Wright photo
Richard Feynman photo

“This dying is boring.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

last words (15 February 1988), recalled by sister Joan Feynman, in Christopher Sykes, editor, No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman (1994), p. 254

“I'm afraid of habit patterns…It would be too much of a routine if you had to establish definite ways of getting through things. You'd get very bored.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)
Context: I'm afraid of habit patterns... It would be too much of a routine if you had to establish definite ways of getting through things. You'd get very bored.

Marilyn Monroe photo
Gioachino Rossini photo

“The stone walls were incised with those inevitable, mysterious symbols which have become nothing more than queer designs now, though a million years ago they bore deep significance.”

C. L. Moore (1911–1987) American author

The Cold Gray God (1935), p. 235
Short fiction, Northwest of Earth (1954)

Ian Urbina photo
María Irene Fornés photo
Charles Stross photo

“I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way.”

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 3, “Tangled Up in Grue” (p. 53)

Roger Stone photo

“The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring, as Dick Nixon would say.”

Roger Stone (1952) American lobbyist

As quoted by Matt Labash, "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016) The Weekly Standard.

Eugene H. Peterson photo
Baruch Spinoza photo

“I proposed not to bore you with any more of my metaphysics or ethics, but I will say a word by way of conclusion. If you want any more, go to Spinoza and Schopenhauer, where I get mine.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

George Santayana, in a letter to Henry Ward Abbot, December 1886. As quoted in A Philosophical Novelist: George Santayana and The Last Puritan, edited by H. T. Kirby-Smith (Southern Illinois University Press, 1997)
S - Z, George Santayana

Vātsyāyana photo
Rufus Wainwright photo

“Rufus is extraordinary, so musically gifted in many diverse fields. He is a prince in shining armour, a true star in these days of dull and boring, pissy little pop stars.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

Gavin Friday, [July 16, 2012, http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/everybody-loves-rufus-3168433.html, everybody loves rufus]

Jude Law photo

“The best actors always retain an air of mystery. The boring actors are the ones who give 100 per cent. One will never get to know the real Jude Law.”

Jude Law (1972) English actor

Po-Chih Leong, director of The Wisdom of Crocodiles, reported in John McVicar, "Jude Law", Artnik, London 2006, p. 4.

Richard Rodríguez photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Mick Jagger photo
James McBride (writer) photo

“Most of my characters: they don't yell, they don't scream. They don't curse, by and large. They're good people. And you know what? Good people don't have to be boring. The really interesting parts of life are the parts we are not witness to. Because the man who decides to shake his neighbor's hand, or help him cut the grass, they're the true heroes…”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On writing about good people in “‘Color of Water’ author, James McBride, reflects on race, politics and his new book” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/novelist-james-mcbride-talks-about-race-politics--and-his-new-book/2017/09/25/8774c4a4-97a1-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html in The Washington Post (2017 Sept 26)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Taiichi Ohno photo
Carl Hiaasen photo
Sydney Brenner photo

“Well, I think my skills are in getting things started. ... In fact, that's what I enjoy most — it's the opening game. And I'm afraid that once it gets past that point I get rather bored with it and want to do other things. ... The other thing I'm good at is talking.”

Sydney Brenner (1927–2019) South African biologist, Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine 2002

[226. My strength and weaknesses, Sydney Brenner, Web of Stories, https://www.webofstories.com/play/sydney.brenner/226]

Robert Graves photo
Natalie Wynn photo
Ennio Morricone photo
James Kenneth Stephen photo
Prosanta Chakrabarty photo
E.M. Forster photo

“As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously."”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.
Letter 104, to Forrest Reid, 19 June 1912
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

David Attenborough photo

“I don't know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, "Why don't you admit that the hummingbird, the butterfly, and the Bird-of-Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?" And I always say, "Well, when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on a riverbank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living organism, that's in its eye and boring through its eyeballs and is slowly turning it blind. The creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm."”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate and so therefore [sic] when I make these films, I prefer to show what I know to be the facts, what I know to be true, and then people can deduce what they will from that.
"Sir David Attenborough" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sir-david-attenborough/, interview with Ed Bradley, CBS News (7 November 2002)

Greg McKeown (author) photo
Ron English photo

“It’s not God I fear but the woman who bore him.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

Clay Shirky photo
Robert Powell photo

“I have always been attracted to difficult work, there really doesn't seem much point in looking for the easy life as an actor. I would simply get bored.”

Robert Powell (1944) English television and film actor

Robert Powell on Jesus, marriage and the Belgian detective: 'My Poirot is my Poirot' https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/theatre/454276/Robert-Powell-talks-Jesus-Pan-s-People-and-Poirot (January 16, 2014)

Matt Ridley photo

“That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics.”

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 1 “Life” (p. 15)

John Wyndham photo

“Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there.”

Pt. II, Ch. II - p.64
Novels, The Secret People (1935)

Bertolt Brecht photo

“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

Referring to Arturo Ui (representing Adolf Hitler), in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)

Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo

“Yesterday’s seer is today’s bore.”

"The Quack Detector", p. 244
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Robert A. Heinlein photo

“It’s lots better to be miserable than to be bored.”

Source: Podkayne of Mars (1963), Chapter 8 (p. 94)

Maureen Corrigan photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Samuel R. Delany photo
Octavia E. Butler photo
Evelyn Waugh photo

“I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Letter to Lady Mosley (9 March 1966), quoted in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (1980), p. 638

Vladimir Zhirinovsky photo

“Are you getting bored doing interviews? That's work. It's the most responsible, representative and solemn work there is — like sport. Anyone who does not aim for the Olympic Games or championships should not be in the sports industry.”

Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946–2022) Russian politician and political activist

"Zhirinovsky: 'Europe, you shall tremble!'" in DW News https://www.dw.com/en/zhirinovsky-europe-you-shall-tremble/a-42923191 (11 March 2018)

Patrick Kavanagh photo
Prevale photo

“Normality is a boring uniformity, madness a lively uniqueness.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La normalità è una noiosa uniformità, la follia una vivace unicità.
Source: prevale.net

Margaret Cho photo

“You will never make love, laugh, fight, eat, go to the movies, kiss, smile, dance, sing, run, skate, play the piano, buy candy for, argue jokingly, tell stories, look longingly at, jump on the bed with, pet the dogs with your faces, sing along with the song in the car and get the words wrong, share a secret, gossip, cop a feel, go hear a band that you both love, share a really good meal, carpool with people you don't like and make fun of them secretly later, cry, comfort, scratch backs, insist on pizza, catch them staring at you, put your arms around them, stay up too late, lean against warm bodies, feel safe with their feet sliding next to yours in bed, raise your children, go to boring dinner parties and get too drunk to drive home so you sleep in the car, spend alternate holidays with each others families, have uncontrollable lust with, followed by mind blowing fuck sessions lasting for hours and hours at a time, take a bath so hot one of you has to get out, all naked and wet and red and dizzy but not embarrassed because this is who you love and rarely are you shy with them, watch a TV show you both hate because the remote control is broken--merely happily, and maybe sometimes unhappily, share your life, and be with them, but you can't, because they're dead. Suddenly, unjustly, untimely, irretrievably--unconscionably dead.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, DEATH

Prevale photo

“Do what you love to do and makes you happy, you will never get bored.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Fate ciò che amate fare e vi rende felici, non vi annoirete mai.
Source: prevale.net