Distraction Quotes - Page 9

• The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, and in all places, and men of genius, in their walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning the eye of the the mind upwards, can form an artificial solitude; retired amidst a crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Wise, Art, Eye

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• I'm a very focused person. If I'm focusing on something I don't like distractions and I like to just do that one thing. And Jiu-Jitsu and MMA basically became that one thing for me.

  Gunnar Nelson

  Mma, Jiu Jitsu, Persons

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• Love, you drive me to distraction.

  Dave Matthews

  Love You

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• Distractions are everywhere. And with the always-on technologies of today, they take a heavy toll on productivity. One study found that office distractions eat an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all.

  David Rock

  Technology, Average, Office

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• What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Long, People, Childhood

  graf Leo Tolstoy (1989). “I Cannot be Silent: Writings on Politics, Art and Religion by Leo Tolstoy”

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• Mentally prepare ourselves for excellence...block out the noise of everyday distractions and tap into the quietness of meaningful focus, intent and a winning mindset.

  Robert Cheeke

  Meaningful, Block, Winning

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• If happiness is a state of the inward life, we have to look for its chief obstructions not in outward conditions but in deeper places. Happiness depends in the last issue, as we saw, on the essential view of life. It is not a matter of distractions, nor even of mere pleasurable sensations. There may be an appearance of great prosperity with incurable sadness hidden at the heart, as there is an outward peace which is only a well-masked despair. The way to happiness is indeed harder than the way to success; for its chief enemies entrench themselves within the soul.

  Hugh Black

  Happiness, Heart, Sadness

  Hugh Black (1911). “Happiness”

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• Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and “distraction.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Reflection, Men, Meditation

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• The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.

  Georges Bernanos

  Mean, Emotional, Animal

  Georges Bernanos (1999). “The Impostor”, p.152, U of Nebraska Press

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• If you can influence the outcome, do the work.
  If you can't influence the outcome, ignore the possibility. It's merely a distraction.

  Seth Godin

  Outcomes, Influence, Possibility

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• Mothers who know do less. They permit less of what will not bear good fruit eternally. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less activity that draws their children away from their home. Mothers who know are willing to live on less and consume less of the world’s goods in order to spend more time with their children—more time eating together, more time working together, more time reading together, more time talking, laughing, singing, and exemplifying. These mothers choose carefully and do not try to choose it all.

  Julie B. Beck

  Mother, Children, Reading

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• It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  May, States, Constant

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• It's too much pressure. You have to think match by match and moment by moment or it drives you to distraction. I'm tired of all the talk about it. Everyone is obsessed with it...If I was the type of person who had tennis, tennis, tennis all the time and I went to bed and ended up dreaming about tennis, I would go nuts.

  Marat Safin

  Dream, Tired, Thinking

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• Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

  Malcolm Bradbury

  Scholarship

  Malcolm Bradbury (2011). “Cuts”, p.47, Pan Macmillan

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• People who are obsessed with God have an intimate relationship with Him. They are nourished by God's Word throughout the day because they know that forty minutes on Sunday is not enough to sustain them for a whole week, especially when they will encounter so many distractions and alternative messages.

  Francis Chan

  Christian, Sunday, Intimate Relationships

  Francis Chan, Preston Sprinkle (2014). “The Francis Chan Collection: Crazy Love, Forgotten God, Erasing Hell, and Multiply”, p.102, David C Cook

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• The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues-not faction, but rather distraction-there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth.

  Plato

  Law, Evil, Would Be

  Plato (1872). “Laws. Appendix: Lesser Hippias. First Alcibiades. Menexenus. Index of persons and places”, p.269

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• The amateur has a long list of fears. Near the top are two: Solitude and silence. The amateur fears solitude and silence because she needs to avoid, at all costs, the voice inside her head that would point her toward her calling and her destiny. So she seeks distraction. The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur.

  Steven Pressfield

  Motivational, Destiny, Two

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• It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one.

  Philip Guston

  Ambition, Color, Drawing

  Magdalena Dabrowski, Philip Guston (1988). “The drawings of Philip Guston”

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• Re. the Caribbean Conservation Corporation
  Everybody in the organization has subscribed to the original concept that its most important attributes are a single-minded resistance to any distraction from the central aim of keeping watch over the Tortuguero nesting colony and a determination to make it the most thoroughly studied sea turtle population in the world.

  Archie Carr

  Determination, Marine, Turtles

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• What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.

  Aldous Huxley

  Past, Brave New World, Thinking

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• Words are a distraction to enlightenment. Getting rid of conceptual thinking means enlightenment.

  Ramesh S Balsekar

  Mean, Thinking, Enlightenment

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• I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Attention, Midst

  "Conversations with Saul Bellow".

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• I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

  T. S. Eliot

  Thinking, America, Poetry

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• When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Silence, World

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.106, Macmillan

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• Freedom from mental distraction equals power.

  Dan Millman

  Dan Millman (2010). “Body Mind Mastery: Training for Sport and Life”, p.53, New World Library

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