Distraction Quotes

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

“It's amazing how much information is coming at us most of the time through technology, the media and the busyness of the world around us. I've decided that the world probably isn't going to change, so I have to change. I'm learning how to keep my mind on what I'm doing, rather than thinking about several things at once or what I want to do next.”

“Much of everyday life is filled with opportunities to be distracted. Our possessions... entertainment... cares and anxieties... and even the passionate desire and pursuit of things, some good and not so good, can keep our minds and hearts caught up in a flurry of activity.”

“I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.”

“Stay focused instead of getting offended or off track by others.”

“People let little things cheat them out of big opportunities”

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

“I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.”

“The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

“And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

“A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.”

“I shoot for the moon but I'm too busy gazing the stars.”

“The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.”

“What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.”

“Bird in hand makes it harder to blow nose.”

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.”

“Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off.”

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

“Pleasure, so called, is the murderer of serious thought. This is the age of excessive amusement. Everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle!”

“When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

“Anxious. Intriguing word. It literally means, "to be divided" or "distracted." It conveys the idea of being so mentally ill at ease that you cannot do what you need to do because you are so distracted in your thinking.”

“Philosophers.-We are full of things which take us out of ourselves.”

“The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel.”

“All mankind's troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly.”