Sermon quotes on boredom

Mark Batterson 

If you’re bored, one thing is for sure: You’re not following in the footsteps of Christ.

In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars.

Frederick Buechner

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

G.K. Chesterton

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

David Foster Wallace

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

Timothy Keller

Faith gives you a concept of the dignity and worth of all work, even simple work, without which work could bore you.

 

Max Lucado

Want to snatch a day from the manacles of boredom? Do overgenerous deeds, acts beyond reimbursement. Kindness without compensation. Do a deed for which you cannot be repaid.

Thomas Szasz

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Leo Tolstoy

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Anna Karenina

Arthur Weigall

It is the goal of the archeology writer to make the dead come alive, not to put the living to sleep.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

Susan Ertz

Someone has somewhere commented on the fact that millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Anger in the Sky

Jerry Seinfeld

Adulthood is the ability to be totally bored and remain standing. Supermarket line, Motor Vehicle Bureau. You hang right in there, solid as a rock.

Is This Anything? Simon & Schuster, 2020.

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