Distracted Quotes - Page 3

• Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.

  Tom Wolfe

  Care, Sometimes, Realizing

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.214, Macmillan

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• One means very effectual for the preservation of health is a quiet and cheerful mind, not afflicted with violent passions or distracted with immoderate cares.

  John Ray

  Passion, Health, Mean

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• Pure love of God is our nature, but we are so much diverted, so much distracted by the externals that we've forgotten that it's our essence.

  Radhanath Swami

  Essence, Forgotten, God Love

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• Distraction and procrastination come in a variety of flavors... when I'm distracted and I walk over and stare out the window, it's a very different experience than when I feed the distraction by cramming in a few emails or make a phone call.

  Linda Stone

  Procrastination, Phones, Different Experiences

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• I think what has happened to our basketball team, we've been badly distracted. They're not reading too many positive things in the paper.

  Bill Russell

  Basketball, Team, Reading

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• A dozen times a day we come to a fork in the road and must decide which way we will go. It is important to get our ultimate objectives clearly in mind so that we do not become distracted at each fork in the road by the irrelevant questions: Which is the easier or more pleasant way? Or, Which way are others going?

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Choices, Mind, Important

  Spencer W. Kimball (1982). “The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, Twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

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• In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.

  Robert Greene

  Media, Skills, Discipline

  Robert Greene (2012). “Mastery”, p.73, Profile Books

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• I focus best and am most productive when I’m working in a friend’s empty apartment. It’s hard for me to work at home. Too easy to procrastinate online, too easy to be distracted by the state of perpetual domestic chaos that rules my home.

  Elissa Schappell

  Home, Focus, Chaos

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• What I remember best from those times is the music itself. When it succeded, we took hold of the audience's attention, working it from a distracted, unshaped mass into spun beauty, passing the fine strands back and forth until we wove together something grander, not only music but memory, too-the particulars of past and present, stretched taut across a loom of timeless ideals. Harmony. Symmetry. Order.

  Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Memories, Past, Order

  Andromeda Romano-Lax (2008). “The Spanish Bow”, p.279, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl.

  Noam Chomsky

  Crazy, Thinking, Oddities

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• Instead, the terrorists see just what they were hoping for, our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

  Dick Cheney

  Opportunity, Leader, Weakness

  AEI Speech, www.weeklystandard.com. May 21, 2009.

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• You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

  Noam Chomsky

  Population, Force, Consumption

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• With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming," To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life, And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116) trans by Robert Thurman

  Huston Smith

  Thinking, Errors, Mind

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• The internet takes a lot of the anxiety of life away. It's a kind of deity. You're never lonely. You're always distracted. If you spend enough time on it, there's not really that nagging sensation of existential despair; it erases it very effectively. And it's monolithic. And thanks to it, we've got the ways to linger there after death - your blog exists afterwards, your e-mail exists afterwards.

  Joshua Ferris

  Lonely, Anxiety, Despair

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Can't you just thank me and get over it?" "Thank you." I waited, fuming and expectant. "You're not going to let it go, are you?" "No." "In that case . . . I hope you enjoy disappointment." We scowled at each other in silence. I was the first to speak, trying to keep myself focused. I was in danger of being distracted by his livid, glorious face. It was like trying to stare down a destroying angel. "Why did you even bother?" I asked frigidly. He paused, and for a brief moment his stunning face was unexpectedly vulnerable. "I don't know," he whispered.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Disappointment, Angel, Silence

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• A clever enemy would kiss my hand, then stab at my back while I was distracted. (Stryker) A coward’s action. Truly. Don’t insult either one of us with such a suggestion. I don’t believe in petty juvenile attacks. I go after what I want, and when it’s the life of an enemy I don’t want there to be any mistaking my intention. If you’re worth my hatred, then you’re worth my letting you know that I’m coming for you. (Zephyra)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Clever, Believe, Kissing

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• When I take my last breath, will there be a wish that I had more stuff? I'll wish for only one thing, I think. That I loved better. That I had been better at loving and not being distracted by stuff or accomplishment. This life is so short and it will soon be over. What will we use it for?

  Colin Beavan

  Thinking, Accomplishment, Wish

  Colin Beavan (2009). “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process”, p.210, Macmillan

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• I pray the breviary every morning. I like to pray with the psalms. Then, later, I celebrate Mass. I pray the Rosary. What I really prefer is adoration in the evening, even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying. In the evening then, between seven and eight o'clock, I stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour in adoration. But I pray mentally even when I am waiting at the dentist or at other times of the day.

  Pope Francis

  Morning, Blessed, Fall

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• His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Moving, Tired, Hands

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• 

  We all get distracted,  the question is, would you bounce back or bounce backwards?

  Kendrick Lamar

  Backwards, Bounce

  Song: Growing Apart

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• It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

  Anne Lamott

  Buddhist, Believe, Men

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, Anchor

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• Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.

  Louise Erdrich

  Eye, Air, Giving

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• A second later, when he looked up at me, we were face to face, and again, even under these circumstances, I was struck by how good looking he was, in that accidental, doesn't-even-know-it kind of way. Which only made it worse. Or better. Or whatever. "Yup", he said, as if there'd been any doubt, "you're in there, all right." "I was warned, too,"I told him, as he stood up. "I just saw that sculpture, and I got distracted." "The sculpture?" He looked at it, then at me. "Oh, right. Because you know it.

  Sarah Dessen

  Doubt, Sculpture, Way

  Sarah Dessen (2006). “The Truth About Forever”, p.90, Penguin

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• what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

  Alain de Botton

  Home, Self, Important

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• The distracted person, too, can form habits.

  Walter Benjamin

  Habit, Form, Persons

  Walter Benjamin (2015). “Illuminations”, p.182, Random House

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