These humdrum quotes will inspire you. Humdrum lacking excitement or variety; dull; monotonous.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging humdrum quotes, humdrum sayings, and humdrum proverbs.
Best Humdrum Quotes
- “Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” ~ Carl Sagan
- “When you’ve spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
- “In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.” ~ Joseph de Maistre
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“Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.” ~ William Osler
- “Have you ever stopped to think what fun this business of living can be? If you haven’t, and if you are one of those who insist upon believing that life is humdrum, grim and boring, then I’m afraid this department is not for you. For I don’t believe any such thing. I know that we can all free ourselves and live our lives fully, zestfully and joyfully!” ~ Dorothy Draper
- “Use your imagination and you’ll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.” ~ Mark Haddon
- “What am I doing with my life? Am I just going to some humdrum job that I don’t really want to be at, doing some minuscule task, getting paid to be a mindless drone? Or am I out there living life, on my terms, the way I want to live it, doing the things that I want to do?” ~ Kai Greene
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“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.” ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
- “it is the sum of small things successfully done that lifts a life out of bondage to the humdrum.” ~ Dorothea Brande
- “Of course some days are easier than others, but my worst day is better than being in most humdrum occupations.” ~ Bernard Cornwell
- “People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.” ~ Daphne du Maurier
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“The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.” ~ D.T. Suzuki
- “Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.” ~ Graham Greene
- “It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he’d experienced it.” ~ Colson Whitehead
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“What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing…having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.” ~ Russell Brand
- “In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” ~ Stephen King
- “That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.” ~ Paul Auster
- “For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner … on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. … That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.” ~ Carl Sagan
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“The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum” ~ Dean Cavanagh
- “A fellow must know where he wants to go, if he is going to get anywhere. It is so easy just to drift along. Some people go through school as if they thought they were doing their families a favor. On a job, they work along in a humdrum way, interested only in their salary check. They don’t have a goal. When anyone crosses them up, they take their marbles and walk out. The people who go places and do things make the most of every situation. They are ready for the next thing that comes along on the road to their goal. They know what they want and are willing to go an extra mile.” ~ William C. Menninger
- “I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn’t matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.” ~ Marilynne Robinson
- “The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house – this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world’s deliverance, but it is not the world’s desire.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty’s dead.” ~ Anne Rice
- “The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself – not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.” ~ Michael Behe
- “To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.” ~ Paul Auster
- “School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one’s personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understanding the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person – vampire or human – to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature.” ~ Melissa de la Cruz
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“The flash of rain, the shining rainbow riding completely around the plane, the liftover mountain ridges, the steady, pure air at dawn take-offs. … It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic, and humdrum.” ~ Dean Smith
- “Down there – he said – are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.” ~ Terry Pratchett
- “People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits. Later on, a Henry Ford might introduce an era of intensely production-minded captains of industry, but the Harrimans, Morgans, Fricks, and Rockefellers were far more interested in the exciting manipulation of huge masses of intangible wealth than in the humdrum business of turning out goods.” ~ Robert Heilbroner
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“I have found no better way than to value and savor the sacredness of daily living, to rely on repetition, the humdrum rhythm which heals and steadies.” ~ Gunilla Brodde Norris
- “How surprisingly alive false ideas are! They even have their own evolution. At first they are highfalutin’ ‘truths,’ then humdrum ‘laws,’ and finally superstitions.” ~ Nina Berberova
- “I know historians aren’t supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie’s Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation’s organization look positively humdrum.” ~ Lauren Willig
- “If God does not enter your kitchen, there is something wrong with your kitchen. If you can’t take God into your recreation, there is something wrong with your play. We all believe in the God of the heroic. What we need most these days is the God of the humdrum, the commonplace, the everyday.” ~ Peter Marshall
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“I grew up on American pop culture so everything that I fantasized about to get out of this sort of humdrum world of Bradford was about America. So when we decided to move there I was on the plane.” ~ Aasif Mandvi
- “Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all.” ~ Marva Dawn
- “I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. “If they don’t like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it’s not that they’re interested in.” But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.” ~ Quentin Crisp
- “Adventure is humdrum and routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler as in a chamber of a counting house; for it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial.” ~ Lewis Mumford
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“God is wanting you to give Him the despised, the humdrum things in your life – like feet – and let Him make them beautiful.” ~ Robert Pierce
- “The rich plankton of pop heroes and pop villains on which we Americans are accustomed to feed, the daily media soup of sports figures, ax murderers, politicians, and rock singers, the ever-running river of celebs, heavies, and oddballs that we use to spice up our own relatively humdrum lives has of late become a very watery gruel. Where have all the good guys and bad guys gone? Why does everyone out there look so gray?” ~ Shana Alexander
- “the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey’s writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.” ~ Anna Quindlen
- “When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
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“Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating” ~ Mark Haddon
- “Anyone who has attempted to create knows the hellishness of it, which consists in the final inescapability from it. Knows that anything, however deadly humdrum to drug the senses, is preferable to it. Knows the gigantic effort to get started on the boundless, unwieldy, shapeless material; the forest of hesitations; of what to keep and what to throw out; the running-out terror and reluctance in one of finishing.” ~ Caitlin Thomas
- “Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it’s peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it’s not always the best thing.” ~ David Byrne
- “MARVEL IS A CORNUCOPIA OF FANTASY, A WILD IDEA , A SWASHBUCKLING ATTITUDE , AN ESCAPE FROM THE HUMDRUM AND PROSAIC. IT’S A SERENDIPITOUS FEAST FOR THE MIND, THE EYE , AND THE IMAGINATION, A LITERATE CELEBRATION OF UNBRIDLED CREATIVITY, COUPLED WITH A TOUCH OF REBELLION AND AN INSOLENT DESIRE TO SPIT IN THE EYE OF THE DRAGON.” ~ Stan Lee
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“No one ever mentioned it, but thousands of men welcomed World War II as a way to escape their humdrum lives rather than a chance to fight for God and country.” ~ Art Buchwald
- “There are too many other inexplicable things around us–horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty’s dead.” ~ Anne Rice
- “I loved the stage not because it provided an escape from myself or my humdrum life but because when the curtain went up I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that was true freedom – to be myself.” ~ Suzanne Farrell
- “What could you do better for your children and your children’s children than to record the story of your life, your triumphs over adversity, your recovery after a fall, your progress when all seemed black, your rejoicing when you had finally achieved? Some of what you write may be humdrum dates and places, but there will also be rich passages that will be quoted by your posterity.” ~ Spencer W. Kimball
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“Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.” ~ Christopher Isherwood
- “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.” ~ Carl Sagan
