Quotes About Avoidance

Your protectors' goals for your life revolve around keeping you away from all that pain, shame, loneliness, and fear, and they use a wide array of tools to meet those goals—achievements, substances, food, entertainment, shopping, sex, obsession with your appearance, caretaking, meditation, money, and so on.

Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But

It was as if words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge, and if you could just build the wall high enough no one would see the growing desert of the vanished on the other side. It was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for.

He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf.

if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterward.

The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterwards.

You are likely to find yourself avoiding your artist dates. Recognize this resistance as a fear of intimacy—self-intimacy

We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.

The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.

Most people managed to evade home truths with astonishing ease.

He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more. We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized. It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning.

She's quiet. She hates confrontation. She'll walk halfway around the world to avoid an argument.

There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn't have to have one herself.

Not only commission makes a sin. A man is guilty of all those sins he hateth not. If I cannot avoid all, yet I will hate all.

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.

Hey man! Get away from me!

Sometimes a man does what he'd most like to avoid.

Every man should know something of law; if he knows enough to keep out of it, he is a pretty good lawyer.

The nature of a coward is to avoid death. If such a man courts peril there can be only two reasons. Either he is not a coward at all or there is no danger.

I couldn't think of anything worse than going to a fancy dress party. So, if somebody invited me to one, I'd go as the Invisible Man and not turn up.