Depressed, anxious, sad, frightened? Yes. But I’ve never been bored.

If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act – and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that’s a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.

To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.

Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.