Education Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis lands the punchline with the cool impatience of a newsroom veteran: boredom isn’t just something bores inflict on everyone else, it’s something they endure in their own echo chamber. The first clause sets a little trap - you expect the bored party to be the victim. Then he flips it. Bores bore each other too. The twist isn’t empathetic; it’s diagnostic. If even their natural habitat - people just like them - can’t generate spark, the problem isn’t circumstance. It’s character.

The subtext is a critique of social obliviousness. The bore, in Marquis’s view, isn’t merely dull; they’re impermeable. They can experience the consequences of their own dullness firsthand and still not register cause and effect. That’s why the last line matters: “but it never seems to teach them anything.” He’s not describing a lack of information but a lack of self-correction. The bore is a person without feedback loops.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Marquis wrote in an early-20th-century media culture built on talk: columns, clubs, dinner parties, lectures, civic meetings. Journalism trained a certain antenna for speech that goes nowhere - windy, self-important, allergic to revision. The line reads like a wry office memo from someone who’s sat through too many monologues and watched the same people keep talking, undeterred by the blank stares they themselves must also feel.

It works because it’s compact moral comedy: a social type pinned to the wall, not with anger, but with the unnerving observation that even their suffering doesn’t educate them.