I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself.

Jules Renard (1864–1910), a French novelist and diarist, is especially known for the aphoristic observations recorded in his Journal. The remark about boredom fits the Journal’s recurring preoccupation with self-scrutiny, discipline, and the moral psychology of everyday life. Renard often treats moods—ennui, vanity, resentment—not as mere circumstances imposed from outside but as states for which one bears responsibility. In that spirit, the line reads like a private maxim: a refusal to blame places, people, or situations for one’s inner emptiness, and an insistence that attention and curiosity are choices the self can cultivate.

Renard reframes boredom as a failure of the self rather than a defect in the world. To be bored is, in his view, to confess a lack of inner resources: imagination, attentiveness, or the capacity to find meaning in small particulars. Calling boredom “an insult to oneself” turns a common complaint into a moral and aesthetic judgment—one that prizes alertness and self-possession. The aphorism also implies a kind of stoic autonomy: external conditions may be dull, but the mind need not be. It is a compact defense of curiosity as self-respect and of interior life as something one actively maintains.