Avoided Quotes

• Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

  Annie Dillard

  Memories, Work, Writing

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• You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.

  Jay McInerney

  Self, Soul, Care

  Jay McInerney (2011). “Bright Lights, Big City”, p.32, Vintage

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• History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

  Konrad Adenauer

  Government, History, Historical

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• Private student loans should be avoided at all costs.

  Suze Orman

  Cost, Students, Loan

  "Suze Orman Warns Against Private Student Loans, Yet Teaches at University of Phoenix" by David Halperin, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 6, 2014.

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• When I look at 225 million women who want contraceptives, and then I look at the 52 million unintended pregnancies that could be avoided by addressing this unmet need, where can we have the biggest impact with our voice, our dollars, our partners? It's on contraceptives. I would rather address the problem upstream.

  Melinda Gates

  Pregnancy, Voice, Impact

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I find very often that very ugly women have really handsome men and vice versa because they don't have any competition. Sometimes handsome men have avoided me.

  Hedy Lamarr

  Beauty, Men, Competition

  Hedy Lamarr (1966). “Ecstasy and me: my life as a woman”

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• There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

  R. D. Laing

  Pain, Bipolar, Trying

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• War can be avoided, and it ought to be avoided. I want no war.

  Chief Joseph

  War, Want, Ought

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• Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?

  Bianca Jagger

  War, Thinking, President

  64 Copy quote

• I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Book, Lure

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• Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Thinking, Goal, Target

  "Idle thoughts" by Tom Hodgkinson, www.theguardian.com. May 19, 2006.

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• Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. A mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Destiny, World, Mystery

  "Markings". Book by Dag Hammarskjöld, 1963.

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• Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking, Wind, Creative

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you have the desire, if you establish the goal - which is harmony, which is happiness through liberation- then these stages of revolt, of war, of struggle, can be avoided - should be avoided. You are not going to wallow in the gutter if you can jump over it.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  War, Struggle, Goal

  Source: www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net

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• The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

  Thomas Pogge

  Average, People, Giving

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• In our long and obsessive passion for youth, we have - more than any other modern society - avoided direct approach to age and to dying by denying them in word, in fact, and - above all - in worth.

  Marya Mannes

  Passion, Long, Dying

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• Against specious appearances we must set clear convictions, bright and ready for use. When death appears as an evil, we ought immediately to remember that evils are things to be avoided, but death is inevitable.

  Epictetus

  Death, Evil, Use

  Epictetus (1866). “The Works of Epictetus: Consisting of His Discourses, in Four Books, the Enchiridion, and Fragments”, p.77

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• The business of life is to go forward; he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way, and he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again to-morrow.

  Samuel Johnson

  Regret, Evil, May

  Samuel Johnson, William Page (1860). “Life and Writings”, p.308

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• [Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

  John Milton

  Italian, Numbers, Long

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• Much waste of words and of thought too would be avoided if disputants would always begin with a clear statement of the question, and not proceed to argue till they had agreed upon what it was that they were arguing about.

  Sara Coleridge

  Would Be, Waste, Arguing

  Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1873). “Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge”, p.136

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• I avoided reality for most of my life. But once you deal with it, it's kind of cool.

  Roseanne Barr

  Reality, Kind, Deals

  "A candid Q&A (is there any other kind?) with Roseanne". Q&A with Craig Wilson, usatoday30.usatoday.com. January 3, 2011.

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• The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Snakes, Circles, Overcoming

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness.

  Bruno Schulz

  Cost, Dull, One Thing

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• Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.

  Pauline Kael

  Life Affirming, Affirming

  Pauline Kael (1989). “Hooked”, E P Dutton

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• It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Proportion, Blight, Centralization

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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