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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
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Boredom stems from impatience and is a conscious decision to find things uninteresting.

In this quote, Bertrand Russell explores the idea that boredom is intertwined with impatience, suggesting that when we find our current situation unengaging, we actively choose to label ourselves as bored. He emphasizes that boredom is not an inherent state, but rather a decision made when one feels discontented with the present circumstances, highlighting the subjective nature of our experiences and perceptions.

Themes

BoredomPatienceImpatienceDecisionInterest

In practice

Example use cases

During a presentation about mental health, one might reference this quote to discuss how perception affects our feelings of boredom.

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At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
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Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
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Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
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