Dullest Quotes & Sayings

It's dull. It's the dullest life you can imagine. Here, you have pain, and loss, that's the price. But the rewards can be wonderful, Gulliver. — Matt Haig

There is no talent so useful toward rising in the world, or which puts men more out of the reach of fortune, than that quality generally possessed by the dullest sort of men, and in common speech called discretion; a species of lower prudence, by the assistance of which, people of the meanest intellectuals, without any other qualification, pass through the world in great tranquillity, and with universal good treatment, neither giving nor taking offence. — Jonathan Swift

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth ... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss! — Wyndham Lewis

I think one of the dullest things in the world is a letter filled with apologies for not writing sooner. — Dorothy Wordsworth

The job of an editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world. — John Hall Wheelock

When you are young so many things are difficult to believe, and yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true
such things, for instance, as that the earth goes round the sun, and that it is not flat but round. But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all. Yet they are so easy to believe, especially when you see them happening. — E. Nesbit

Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit. — Philip Zaleski

Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness — Thomas Carlyle

There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all! ... These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? — Thomas Carlyle

The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night - visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality thought that makes the difference - not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking. And our greatest thinkers, those who have radically changed our world, have always arrived at their truths by dreaming them; they are first fantasized, and only then subjected to proof. — Leonard Bernstein

Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. — David Sedaris

There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it. — Frederick Buechner

The commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker. — Jane Austen

Did you ever wonder why Spot runs so much? He's running away from Dick and Jane and Sally, the dullest family in the world. — George R R Martin

This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea? — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I can recall back in 1998, in August of that year, when we had a horrible disaster along the Mexican border in the town of Del Rio. At the time, FEMA was the shining star of the federal government. It's now perceived as many to be the dullest knife in the drawer. Right or wrong, that's the perception. — Henry Bonilla

The dullest thing in the world is waiting for your scene. But the most exciting thing is seeing yourself on the screen and then getting compliments. — Casey Kasem

The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink. — Claudia Rankine

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required. — P.G. Wodehouse

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr — Henry David Thoreau

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. — Mark Twain

She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible
and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary
fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood. — Vladimir Nabokov

The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law. — Emma Goldman

it's nearly impossible to convey our deepest passions yet damned easy to share what's dullest and worst about ourselves. — Charles D'Ambrosio

You will find that the dullest, most functionally illiterate mental mushroom has a very definite, very "scientific" view on one thing: the impossibility of any kind of psychic phenomena. — Simon

You can greet even the dullest acquaintance with pleasure, if you have forgotten their dreary story. — Jude Morgan

Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book - the rough review of recent thought. — G.K. Chesterton

Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones. — Thomas Hardy

Hello, Earth.
So this is how God sees you, sparkling blue against the dullest black. No wonder he made you. No wonder he made the sun and the stars so he could see you. — Rick Yancey

Mr Cobb would acquaint him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party. — Charles Dickens

Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely amiable by nature; he is always amiable as if on command, out of calculation. If, for instance, he sees the necessity of being fantastic, original, out of the ordinary, then his fantasy, being most stupid and unnatural, assembles itself out of a priori accepted and long-trivialized forms. The natural Frenchman consists of a most philistine, petty, ordinary positiveness
in short, the dullest being in the world. In my opinion, only novices, and Russian young ladies in particular, are attracted to Frenchmen. Any decent being will at once notice and refuse to put up with this conventionalism of the pre-established forms of salon amiability, casualness, and gaiety. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whether your the brightest or the dullest
In the Midst of any darkness
Any spark can make a great diffrence
to the situation — Sandile Sean Mntla

The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans. — Jonathan Swift

We walk, and our religion is shown even to the dullest and most insensitive person in how we walk. Or to put it more accurately, living in this world means choosing, choosing to walk, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself. Nothing can disguise it. The walk of an ordinary man and of an enlightened man are as different as that of a snake and a giraffe. — Reginald Horace Blyth

One of the bibles of my youth was 'Birds of the West Indies,' by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, 'My God, that's the dullest name I've ever heard,' so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one. — Ian Fleming

All the world complain now a days of a press of trivial duties & engagements which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of, - but undoubtedly if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, provided they were released from all those engagements - they would now at once fulfill the superior engagement, and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. They would never be caught saying that they had no time for this when the dullest man knows that this is all that he has time for. — Henry David Thoreau

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous ... The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge. — H.L. Mencken

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God ... and where can you go from there? — Al Pacino

I have often observ'd the loudest Laughers to be the dullest Fellows in the Company. — Mary Wortley Montagu

Honestly, I find the analysis of dreams is one of the dullest things. I say this as a therapist kid. I find them deeply uninteresting, as a window to the soul. — Ira Glass

Troubles, even the dullest, are always mildly interesting at the first hearing ... — Celia Fremlin

The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had "placed" one by one in enviable niches of existence! — Edith Wharton

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns
...
It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. — Jean-Paul Sartre

He laughed, and the sound reduced the pain of every sore place on my body to the dullest ache. — Tammara Webber

If a drunkard in a sober fit is the dullest of mortals, an enthusiast in a reason-fit is not the most lively. And this, without prejudice to his greatly improved understanding; for, if his elation was the height of his madness, his despondency is but the extreme of his sanity. — Herman Melville

It has been said that the immortality of the soul is a grand peut-tre -but still it is a grand one. Everybody clings to it -the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is still persuaded that he is immortal. — Lord Byron

I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. — James A. Garfield

Even the dullest bird or face becomes interesting when you give it a good look in the wild/flesh. The way the shadow drops across the cheek, the light hits an eyebrow, etc ... there are many more angles, positions etc. than you can ever imagine. My heart always makes a little jump when I see things in birds or faces that surprise me. — Siegfried Woldhek

You have a poem called "Bad Theology." What would you call a bad theology?
I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We'll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I'm not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end. — Tony Leuzzi

An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think. — E.A. Bucchianeri

It is always dullest before the yawn. — Bob Phillips

Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water ... — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

To see me as a person on screen would be one of the dullest experiences you could ever wish to experience. — Peter Sellers

The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation — David Hume

Now that the Harry Potter series is over, maybe the truth can be realized: This has been the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises. — Armond White

Boring, religious, and intellectually limited, Marie Leczinska was called one of the two dullest queens in Europe by her own father, the other dull queen being his wife. Marie — Eleanor Herman

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart. — Peggy Noonan

Ironically, I think action can be the dullest part of movies nowadays - and I love action movies! — Matthew Vaughn

The only reason Toronto is no longer the dullest city on earth is that it is no longer full of Anglo-Canadians. It is full of Hong Kong Chinese. And not a few Italians. — Joel Garreau

There's no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility. Beneath the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy. — Mark Twain

If God put the rainbows right in the clouds themselves, each one of us in the direst and dullest and most dreaded and dreary moments can see a possibility of hope ... Each one of us has the chance to be a rainbow in somebody's cloud. — Maya Angelou

Your secret was not the craftsman's delight in process,
which doesn't distinguish work from pleasure
your way was not to exalt nor avoid
the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant:
everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside
the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence
your being had opened to. Where it shone,
there life was, and abundantly; it touched
your dullest task, and the task was easy. — Denise Levertov

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare ... it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. — Justin S. Holcomb

Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable. — Craig Brown

Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great any of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color. — Leigh Hunt

The dullest man in the world is charming beyond belief when he's pouring gold coins from one hand to the other. — David Eddings

The dullest observer must be sensible of the order and serenity prevalent in those households where the occasional exercise of a beautiful form of worship in the morning gives, as it were, the keynote to every temper for the day, and attunes every spirit to harmony. — Washington Irving

...so I took it out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

What a folly is it now," he instantly resumed, leaving the general and attacking a particular, "to think to make people good by promises and threats
promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in the human system! — George MacDonald

Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It meant, 'One can plainly see you are sensitive, intense, and interesting, and therefore neurotic.' Only the dullest of clods trudged around without a neurosis. — Barbara Holland

Love, like the opening of the heavens to the saints, shows for a moment, even to the dullest person, the possibilities of the human race. One has faith, hope, and charity for another being, perhaps but the creation of the imagination; still it is a great advance for a person to be profoundly loving, even in his or her imagination. — Arthur Helps

What was once impossible now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man-the heart of it-is pure and holy joy. — George Leonard

When I wrote the first [Bond novel] in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened ... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard. — Ian Fleming

When [Niels] Bohr is about everything is somehow different. Even the dullest gets a fit of brilliancy. — Isidor Isaac Rabi

Cash or check?" he said cheekily. Even the dullest Ohio girls knew that bit of lingo: Kiss now or kiss later?
"Bank's closed, pal. — Libba Bray

It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. — Thomas Carlyle

She had never heard the word 'intellectual' used as a noun before she went to Barnard, and she took it to heart. It was a brave noun, a proud noun, a noun suggesting lifelong dedication to lofty things and a cool disdain for the commonplace. An intellectual might lose her virginity to a soldier in the park, but she could learn to look back on it with wry, amused detachment. An intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but she wouldn't let it bother her. And Emily Grimes might not be an intellectual yet, but if she took copious notes in even the dullest of her classes, and if she read every night until her eyes ached, it was only a question of time. — Richard Yates

I have never in my life played the French Defence, which is the dullest of all openings. — Wilhelm Steinitz

Relaxation is a physical and moral necessity. Animals, even to the simplest and dullest, have their games, their sports, their diversions. The toil-worn artisan, stooping and straining over his daily task, which taxes eye and brain and limb, ought to have opportunity and means for an hour or two of relaxation after that task is concluded. — Horace Greeley

The dullest Olympic sport is curling, whatever 'curling' means. — Andy Rooney

In spite of my conviction that a group of deliberately assembled relatives can be one of the dullest, if not most dangerous, gatherings in the world, I am smugly foolhardly enough to have invited all my available family, more than once, to dine with me. — M.F.K. Fisher