A Quote by John Ortberg

Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.

John Ortberg

Quote Topics

Amusement Avoidance Boredom Diversion Exercise External Fails Mere Minds Our Stimulation Through Way

Quote Author

John Ortberg
American - Priest
Born: May 5, 1957

The stimulation I get from my phone does not feel like the opposite of boredom to me. It actually feels like a different flavor of boredom... a twitchier flavor. And sometimes, it's almost more irritation than stimulation. It's an itch.

Robin Sloan

Most of us fill up our lives and end our boredom with our involvement with other people - people we love, people we hate, people we're afraid of, people we're interested in - and that's what keeps our minds going. So if you're sociopathic and you really have no caring for anybody, there's not much left, only boredom, and the way to relieve that, apparently, is to play a game and make sure that you win.

Martha Stout

Sometimes it appears that we're reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation. We seem to be approaching an Age of the Gross. Persuasion through speeches and books is too often discarded for disruptive demonstrations aimed at bludgeoning the unconvinced into action.

Spiro T. Agnew

In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.

Mark Epstein

Any successful corporation, if they adopt the three, they're going to be not just wealthy but they're going to be balanced. A lot of corporations adopt exercise, discipline, no affection. But you must maintain the three, because it's part of what you need. You need physical stimulation, you need mental stimulation and of course you need emotional stimulation.

Cesar Millan

Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.

Bertrand Russell

There's physical adversity, that if you are someone that likes exercise like I do, I exercise everyday. When you exercise, there's pain involved and so you're putting yourself through adversity in that situation. It's never totally pleasurable and there are moments where it's kind of boring or painful and you know that in doing that, you're making your mind and body tougher and more resilient. So must be able to deal with the boredom that happens in life.

Robert Greene

Boredom has to be the most life sapping, mental disease you can be afflicted with.The most accurate definition of boredom I have ever heard is this - Boredom is the absence of a creative idea. But there is a simple cure - begin to think immediately of a better way to do something. The creative juices are within you but you must turn on the tap. Those who are bored are not living; they are dying. When their heart stops beating, it will be a mere formality. The best way to do anything has never been thought of. Get on a creative improvement kick and jar others mentally into the same activity.

Bob Proctor

The only way some of us exercise our minds is by jumping to conclusions.

Cullen Hightower

To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.

Timothy Leary

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.

Anais Nin

You will never realize your best destiny through the avoidance of fear. Rather, you will realize it through the exercise of courage, which means taking whatever action is most liberating to the soul, even when you are afraid.

Martha Beck

People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.

Louis Zamperini

Perhaps why so much of today's photography doesn't grab us or mean anything to our personal lives is that it fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy, which is hungry for stimulation.