Julio Cortazar
Novelist, Short Story Writer
"All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate."
Distraction quotes
Distraction
123 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
T. S. Eliot
Poet, Playwright
"Distracted from distraction by distraction"
Blaise Pascal
Mathematician, Physicist, Philosopher
"Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries."
Dylan McDermott
Actor
"Once you understand that someone has Tourette and that they can't help their tics, it takes away the distraction. And you can engage your compassion. You feel for them. You embrace them."
Ramana Maharshi
Spiritual Teacher
"When there are thoughts, it is distraction: when there are no thoughts, it is meditation."
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Topics related to Distraction
Browse quotes that often appear alongside distraction — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Distraction quotes (page 1 of 7)
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"Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions."
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"Until my ONE thing is done, everything else is a distraction."
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"The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction"
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"I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."
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"He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice."
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"Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also."
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"If you have never had any distractions you don't know how to pray."
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"I work all the time because it's a great distraction and it keeps me from sitting home and obsessing morbidly."
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"This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing To waft me from distraction."
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"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."
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"In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
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"Anything you believe you have to do or become before you can be free is a denial and distraction from the truth that you are already free."
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"The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don’t love you back."
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"The abundance of books is distraction"
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"Distractions have never prevented a Writing Writer Who Writes from writing; distractions are an excuse proffered by Non-Writing Non-Writers Who are Not-Writing for why they are not writing."
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"What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward."
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"The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions."
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"I am of Russian-Jewish distraction."
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"When we clutter our lives with imagined obligations, unnecessary activities, and distractions that only kill time, we dilute the power of our lives."
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"If you see distraction externally, you end up creating an internally distracted state."
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