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I want to make a positive point of Ikea. It makes income inequality a minor distraction.
Sep 10, 2025
In many cases, people who win a Nobel prize, their work slows down after that because of the distractions. Yes, fame is rewarding, but it's a pity if it keeps you from doing the work you are good at.
Even worthwhile endeavors need evaluation in order to determine if they have become distractions from the best goals.
Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.
The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing.
Narrator: You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
Don't be too much concerned about money, because that is the greatest distraction against happiness. And the irony of ironies is that people think they will be happy when they have money. Money has nothing to do with happiness. If you are happy and you have money, you can use it for happiness. If you are unhappy and you have money, you will use that money for more unhappiness. Because money is simply a neutral force.
Nothing is quite so emotional and passionate as what goes on inside of a family. People are driven to distraction by a father or a mother or a husband. Or a child.
If you're dissatisfied anywhere, New York is the place to be. If you're unhappy at college in Topeka, I don't know what there is to distract yourself with, you know? So anyway, I distracted myself until I decided that the distraction could be a school in and of itself.
I feel that the connection with children and mothers is so strong in places where there are not so many 'things' to get in the way, no electronic distraction devices, no high-tech baby equipment, just a mother carrying her little one everywhere, sharing a family bed and having the help of all the other women around to raise the baby.
The Zen meditative approach has a simple, unstated premise: moods and attitudes shape—determine—what we think and perceive. If we feel happy, we tend to develop certain trains of thought. If we feel sad or angry, still others. But suppose, with training, we become nonattached to distractions and learn to dampen these wild, emotional swings on either side of equanimity. Then we can enter that serene awareness which is the natural soil for positive, spontaneous personal growth, often called spiritual growth.
The process of making films is so technically demanding that it's a distraction. You don't spend your time thinking about the philosophical content, which is often very depressing.
A mind that worries about the past is distracted, and a mind that worries about the future is delusional.
That's because of everything the public interest and the media interest is focused on: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? Whether there was cooperation with the Russians. I don't mean to say that's a distraction or we shouldn't follow it up. But the underlying story of the Russians trying to subvert our democracy, both through propaganda, planted stories, manipulation of social media and through direct efforts to infiltrate our state election system, is really an enormously significant event. And it's not over.
It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.
Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.
Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.
The subconscious mind is probably the most important factor in being a good golfer. It keeps distractions on the course from ruining a good round. You should practice, develop your swing, and do most of your thinking on the practice tee so that when you play in competition, you can hit the ball automatically.
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.
You're competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome. You can't merely wing it and expect to keep up with them. Setting aside all the safety valves and pleasant distractions is the first way to send yourself the message that you're playing for keeps
Upon further reflection, and after meeting with the President of MSNBC, I have tendered my resignation. It is my sincere hope that all of my colleagues, at this special network, will be allowed to focus on the issues that matter without the distraction of myself or my ill-judged comments.
No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
Throughout history there have been many men and women who have chosen to imitate Jesus as he withdraws into the desert... To pass time in the desert means to create a little emptiness and silence around us, to rediscover the road to our heart, to remove ourselves from the noise and external distractions, to enter into contact with the deepest source of our being and our faith.
Here's what we [Americans] need: a 30 second you tube video of some guy at a party constantly checking out everyone else at the party, while he pretends to be speaking to the other person. We're the other person. The guy are the politicians. And the distraction is the corruption: We need a Congress that can afford to talk to us. For at least one drink or so.
All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.
I don't have one thing I go back to, but we listen to a lot of music in the bus, and we always get a few songs or a few records that end up being themes for the tour. On tour I read all of George Saunders' short stories and all of Alice Munro's short stories. George Saunders is who has taught me about this question about whether or not love is possible in the contemporary world, with all of its simulations and all of its pop and divergences and all of the confusion and distraction. Whether or not contemporary reality is actually hospitable to love.
If one were truly aware of the value of human life, to waste it blithely on distractions and the pursuit of vulgar ambitions would be the height of confusion.
My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature
I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.
I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions.
We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%.
It is so important that you don't get distracted by what you are not. You need to start confessing your persona and living in it, and don't be bewildered by your circumstances. Just stay on course with what God is promising you.
Art is a high calling - fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others - indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit.
Our normal human tendencies are distraction and dissipation. We begin one task, then get seduced by some other option, and lose our focus. We drift away from what is difficult and we know to be true, to what is comfortable and socially condoned.
It hurt me to be away from him. Some days I went crazy wondering what he was doing. And when I couldn't handle it, I practiced music. I really had Aspen to thank for me being the musician that I was. He drove me to distraction. And that was bad.
Working to anticipate the future can be a distraction from the important task of dealing with the present.
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches.
The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white - unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister's expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her - a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.
The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.
Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied, 'and the different branches of arithmetic-ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.
There are so many distractions you can face as a woman, either with relationships or worrying about, Should I go to this party? or, Should I be doing this to help me get ahead? All [success] is, is doing your work and staying focused. It's boring advice, but boring good advice is what you can get from me!
This sordid affair has become an unacceptable distraction for Representative Weiner, his family, his constituents and the House - and for the good of all, he should step aside and address those things that should be most important - his and his family's well-being.
I think most American churchgoers are the soil that chokes the seed because of all the thorns. Thorns are anything that distracts us from God. When we want God and a bunch of other stuff, then that means we have thorns in our soil. A relationship with God simply cannot grow when money, sins, activities, favorite sports teams, addictions, or commitments are piled on top of it.
There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.
Acclaim is a distraction.
At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.
The abundance of books is distraction
Let us remember the devil labors hard to disturb us at the time of recollection in order to make us abandon it. Let him then who omits mental prayer on account of distractions be persuaded that he gives delight to the devil.