Quotes About Distraction

Watching football is like watching pornography. There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.

I attempt all day, at work, not to think about what lies ahead, but this costs me so much effort that there is nothing left for my work. I handle telephone calls so badly that after a while the switchboard operator refuses to connect me. So I had better say to myself, Go ahead and polish the silverware beautifully, then lay it out ready on the sideboard and be done with it. Because I polish it in my mind all day long—this is what torments me (and doesn't clean the silver).

Just as it is hard for us, in our garden, to stop weeding, because there is always another weed there in front of us, it may be hard for her to stop grazing, because there are always a few more shoots of fresh grass just ahead of her.

And so we turn off the telephone during this program and do not answer the knock at the door that rarely comes.

Free yourself of your device, for at least certain hours of the day—or at the very least one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people and without a device that is turned on. Learn to experience the purity of that kind of concentration. Develop focus, learn to focus intently on one thing, uninterrupted, for a long time.

Because we have so much eye candy and mind candy, spending so much time trying to pay the rent, all of this conspires to keep us from thinking too hard or taking action from that. Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen.

It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place this world is when one is playing golf.

Then my outrage wandered away: never do junk if you need to finish thoughts, sentences, or simple tasks.

The trouble with multitasking. In study after study, researchers have shown that performing multiple tasks at once makes the brain less efficient. Basically, the brain doesn't become proficient at doing multiple tasks, it simply becomes faster at skipping back and forth between them and blocking other information out.

when the mind shifts back and forth it actually slows down. This shifting back and forth is known as "switchtasking" and there's a high cost to doing this habitually.

His mother had often talked about the way certain books called you when you were really engrossed in them and to put them down.

Rejection—It may be a delay. It may be a distraction. It may even be a devastation for a season but it is not your final destination.

How dangerous it is when our souls are gasping for God but we're too distracted flirting with the world to notice.

The Devil wants me to fill my emptiness with an unhealthy dependence on the acceptance of others. Because then he can get me so focused on the shallow opinions of others I get completely distracted from deepening my relationship with Christ.

Do not check in with the screaming demands of the world before you exchange whispers with God

How dangerous it is when our souls are gasping for God but we're too distracted flirting with the world to notice. Flirting will give you brief surges of fun feelings but will never really pull you in and hold you close. Indeed, the world entices your flesh but never embraces your soul.

your phone randomly sends those memory movies of what happened on this same day four years ago, it stops you from breathing.

Everything in me wanted to just cross out that ridiculous 3.5-hour scheduled writing appointment and go eat fries in the midst of colored plastic tubes and screaming kids.

The fascination of trifles obscures the good," says the Wise Man. It is difficult in the midst of much doing and seeing to keep alive and present to the deepest reality, to the really real. And so the monk goes apart…

Cars were stopped in the middle of roads so people could run into discount clothing stores.

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that.

When acquaintances met him on the road, Wen said he couln't stop to discuss the Communists or Nationalists, Stalin, Truman or the weather, because he was composing a six-character eight line regulated verse in his head, and any variation in his path wuld push the words out of order. It was a lie. In fact, he was empty of poetry a d afraid of words.

Forgive me. It was stupid of me to think you might need company, when clearly all you required was that decanter." "It was not stupid. It was very kind. Quite soft, actually. A very warm, womanly gesture. I am touched." He smiled softly. "However, if you truly want to help, if you really want to distract me, there are better ways. When I saw that dress, I dared hope you had realized that.

He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration. Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.