Avoidance Quotes

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.”
― Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

“Problem is, the bathroom pass can't help you escape life. It's still there when you come out. Problems and crap don't go away hiding in the can.”
― Simone Elkeles, Perfect Chemistry

“Confrontation leads to action. Avoidance leads to inaction.”
― Colleen Hoover, All Your Perfects

“You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.”
― B.F Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

“If life has got to be a play, let's play it well. As the avoidance of problems and the maintenance of inner peace may guide us smartly through open and unswerving confrontations, let's face up to conflicts playfully, as well. Playfulness allows us to see things from different angles and may sometimes save us from harmful outcomes. ("The band was still playing")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.”
― R.D. Laing

“Depression is about anger, it is about anxiety, it is about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths they have so painstakenly created for themselves. [...] It is a plague - especially if you add in its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour of one kind or another. They're all the same things: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness, or chaos.”
― Tim Lott, Scent of Dried Roses

“Emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let yourself heal.”
― Vironika Tugaleva

“Avoid those who seek friends in order to maintain a certain social status or to open doors they would not otherwise be able to approach.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“All that effort,” he mused, “merely to avoid me. How gratifying.”
― Shana Abé, The Smoke Thief

“What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Avoidance is a wonderful therapy”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Linger

“She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why." Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.”
― David L. Calof

“Bravery is the choice to show up and listen to another person, be it a loved one or perceived foe, even when it is uncomfortable, painful, or the last thing you want to do.”
― Alaric Hutchinson

“Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)”
― Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“The choice to avoid risk is the choice to avoid living, and to avoid living is one of the greatest risk of all.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“People will seek the ends of the galaxy to avoid that which they need most.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Fight for change? Thirst for difference?
Start talking what men avoid talking about.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“I didn't avoid my problems. I just didn't feel as though I had to focus on them every minute of every day. And telling people about certain aspects of my life would only create trouble. If I was guilty of anything, it was of trying not to bring new problems into my life. That wasn't avoidance. That was logical thinking.”
― Mara Purnhagen, One Hundred Candles

“This world today makes one by the day a recluse”
― Sian Lavinia Anais Valeriana, Lavinia - Volume One

“There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“some truths that were too difficult and frightening to know.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“All work is the avoidance of harder work.”
― James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

“No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.”
― Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream