Distraction Quotes

Tale-bearing emits a threefold poison; for it injures the teller, the hearer, and the person concerning whom the tale is told.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

They say you don’t get over someone until you find someone or something better. As humans, we don’t deal well with emptiness. Any empty space must be filled. Immediately. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with that empty spot causes excruciating pain. That’s why we run from distraction to distraction—and from attachment to attachment.

Yasmin Mogahed

She had become so much more accustomed to hard work and opposition than to adulation that the only emotion she had felt had been one of acute discomfort.

Margaret Landon

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

Sherry Turkle

Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.

Geraldine Brooks

To all the readers,whom despitethe attraction of tv,of internet,of family troubles,of video games,of sport,of night clubs,have found some hoursso we can all dream together.

Bernard Werber

Marian Deegan

Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

Sarah Blake

Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.

Flannery O'Connor

The simple rhythms of nature are calling you. Let them wash away the clutter and distractions from your false life.

Bryant McGill

Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues.

H.W. Brands

Creating chaos provides excitement for some people, especially those who are uneasy with silence, those who distract themselves from their own problems by focusing outward, those who feel empty inside and need to fill themselves up with activity, and those who were raised in an environment in which harmony and peace were unknown.

Beverly Engel

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I need a drink. Now.”After tossing—fine, throwing—my purse and keys on the couch, I march straight into the kitchen. No more delays; it's time to forget tonight. It’s been yet another night like all the other first dates that never meet a second one. When you begin to lose count, that's when it's really time for a drink.Adrian stands there, leaning against the counter in an unbuttoned dress shirt and dark wash jeans. He glances at me as I walk in. “How was your date?” he asks, taking a swig of his scotch.I brush past him on my mission, opening the cupboard and moving a couple bottles around. I reiterate, “I need alcohol.”Out of the corner of my eye, I catch him hiding a smile before he says, “That bad?”My face twitches as I ignore his line of questioning. It is more like a statement he wants me to clarify, even though he already knows the answer. Instead, I ask, “I have vodka left, don't I?” I stand on my tiptoes in hopes of spotting something in the very back. Nothing.He waltzes over and looks with me, his chin almost touching my shoulder. “I think you polished that one off after last week's date.” His voice is low right next to my ear, very nearly causing a shiver.

Lilly Avalon

This is the problem about thinking about something else to take your mind off something. It works for a little while, but in the end you always come back to the thing you were trying not to think about, only now whatever it was is worse.

Marcelo Figueras

I should have learned mindfulness, and it’s too late now because it’s no good learning it when you’re already in crisis: you have to start when things are good. But only the very, very oddest would think, Hey, my life is perfect. I know! I’ll sit and waste twenty minutes Observing My Thoughts without Judgement.

Marian Keyes

Eighteen pockets in one suit? I haven't the time.

A.A. Milne

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

Ron Suskind

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

Bill Bryson

Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.

Augustine of Hippo

In politics, nothing good ever comes from the unexpected.

Chris Matthews

Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.

Aldous Huxley

The confusion created by mode of fictitious imagery, staged to produce a perceived idea of character or life, does only that - confuses.

Nicole Bonomi

More voices means less trust in any given voice.

Eli Pariser

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.

George F. Will

Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.

Rick Perlstein

Oh, don't go on like that!" cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. "Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come today. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. "Can you keep from crying by considering things?" she asked."That's that way it's done," the Queen said with great decision: "nobody can do two things at once, you know.

Lewis Carroll

Well, hell yeah! I’m gonna kick your ass, too!”I narrowed my eyes at him. “Not this time you’re not. I have a new superpower.”He laughed. “And what’s that? Harsh language?”I leaned over to kiss his neck once, and then ran my tongue up to his ear, kissing his earlobe. He froze in place. “Distraction,” I breathed into his ear. He grabbed my arms and flipped me onto my back. “You’re going to miss another class.

Jamie McGuire

... answered his knock with a smile, a short one forced through because she was at heart a warm person, not given to the dark mood swings which now plagued her.

John Grisham

Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, "Have you any news?

Harold Holzer

The more my brain was fed, the hungrier it became.

Kevin DeYoung

He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusiona distraction

Jennifer DeLucy

The author tells a story wherein a missionary friend of his was invited by unbelievers on a train ride to play cards. The friend declined, saying that he did not bring his hands with him. He explained to the astonished group that the hands attached to what they saw as his body belonged to the Lord, and he was thereby able to explain the Gospel.

Watchman Nee

you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

David Brooks

The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

Pearl S. Buck

The lightheaded and the fashionable are always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs.

Richard Brookhiser

Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

Rick Perlstein

Being self-owned is a state of mind.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To some people, employment is a distraction. To all entertainers, distraction is employment.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I needed something to distract me-anything far away from my parents’ drama-just for a second. And when I saw my chance I didn’t stop to think about how much I’d regret it later. An opportunity sat on the bar stool beside me, and I lunged at it. Literally.I kissed Wesley Rush.One second his hand lay on my shoulder, and his gray eyes rested, for once, on my face, and the next my mouth was on his. My lips were fierce with bottled emotion, and he seemed to tense, his body frozen in shock. That didn’t last very long. An instant later, he returned the aggression, his hands flying to my sides and pulling me toward him. It felt like a battle between our mouths. My hands clawed into his curly hair, tugging it way harder than necessary, and his fingertips dug into my waist.It worked better than punching someone would have. Not only did it help me release the agonizing pressure, but it definitely distracted me. I mean, it’s hard to think about your dad when you’re making out with somebody.And as disturbing as it sounds, Wesley was a really good kisser. He leaned into me, and I tugged at him so hard that he nearly fell off his bar stool. In that moment, we just couldn’t get close enough to each other. Our separate seats seemed like they were miles apart.All of my thoughts vanished, and I became a sort of physical being. Emotions disappeared. Nothing existed but our bodies, and our warring lips were at the center of everything. It was bliss! It was amazing not to think.Nothing! Nothing… until he screwed it up.

Kody Keplinger

Distraction leaches the authenticity out of our communications. When we are not emotionally present, we are gliding over the surface of our interactions and we never tangle in the depths where the nuances of our skills are tested and refined. A medical professor describes the easy familiarity with which her digital-native resident students master medical electronic records—but is troubled by the fact that they enter data with their eyes focused on their digital devices, not on the patient in the room with them. Preoccupation with technology acts as a screen between the student and the patient’s real emotion, real fear, and real concern. It may also prevent these residents from noticing physical symptoms that the patient fails to mention. The easy busyness of medical record entry is a way to sidestep the more challenging dynamics of human connection. But experienced physicians know that interpersonal skills are essential to mastering the art and science of medical diagnosis.

Marian Deegan

He closed the laptop. A sure sign I was about to receive his full attention.

Ransom Riggs

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

George Eliot

Unbelief is a master carpenter at cross-making.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.

Alain de Botton

The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.

Augustine of Hippo

The shadow of the passions of the moment transversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.

Victor Hugo

When grace has won the day, the worldling seeks the world to come.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Adoration drives obedience, but throughout history people are prone to forget the faithfulness of God yesterday.

Matt Chandler

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis

Philip Zaleski

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.

George Eliot

Twitter is a serious writing distraction. As are grapefruits. The two have nothing else in common.

Richelle E. Goodrich

The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.

Os Guinness

After giving it some thought, I've decided to name my monkey mind Ricky Bobby. I was thinking about Latin names like Javier, but I don't want to make my jumping, distractable self sound mysterious and sexy. Ricky Bobby makes me laugh. A name like that seems silly, not strong. Just a goofy little thing that doesn't know what to do with its hands, likes to go fast, and loves tiny, infant, baby Jesus.

Anna White

Potential was a red herring to plot a life of wandering curiosity.

Nicholas Dawidoff

The phrase "having it all" has little to do with having what we want.

Jennifer Senior

I am trying not to philosophize. It is un-military. I think I can dig myself out of my academic mind and make an efficient officer.

James Carl Nelson

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Distraction Quotes

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