To make life more bearable and pleasant for everybody, choose the issues that are significant enough to fight over, and ignore or ...use distraction for those you can let slide that day. Picking your battles will eliminate a number of conflicts, and yet will still leave you feeling in control.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality is best apprehended, archetypes that have their ultimate ori...gin in Plato and Aristotle. For Plato sense data were at best a distraction from knowledge, which was the province of unaided reason. For Aristotle, knowledge consisted in generalizations, but these were derived in the first instance from information gathered from the outside world. These two models of human thinking, termed rationalism and empiricism, respectively, formed the major intellectual legacy of the West down to Descartes and Bacon, who represented, in the seventeenth century, the twin poles of epistemology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distractio...n.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is asleep. He knows no longer the fatigue of the work of deciding, the work to finish. He sleeps, he has no longer to strain, t...o force himself, to require of himself that which he cannot do. He no longer bears the cross of that interior life which proscribes rest, distraction, weaknesshe sleeps and thinks no longer, he has no more duties or chores, no, no, and I, old and tired, oh! I envy that he sleeps and will soon die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"I couldn't afford to learn it," said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. "I only took the regular course." "What was that?" inquire...d Alice. "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic--Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." "I never heard of 'Uglification,'" Alice ventured to say.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is my PRIDE, my damn'd, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19-20th of my Composi...tion is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such;Mor DIE--perplexing alternative!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men have a low threshold for distraction. They are delicate. They are made nervous by having to do more than one thing at a time. ...They feel frazzled and angry if they have to answer three phone calls, and have a hard time settling back to work after the trauma. Women, on the other hand, develop the skill of doing many things at once. They tuck the phone in between their shoulders and their ears, hold a baby on one hip, stir a pot on the stove, all the while thinking about an idea for a story. They don't think it's unfair to have to do this. They think it's normal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the ...distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »