Quotes & Sayings About Avoiding Reality

My house was built by a partnership called Desire and Ignorance; they often work together, and always with disastrous consequences. It's surprising they aren't more talked of in the press. They are great survivors but incompetent builders. Desire is famous only for pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, while Ignorance casts a veil over all his unexamined assumptions and makes wrong ones every hour. Together, they created the psychological reality where I live. Hardly a surprise, therefore, if it's unfit for purpose! — Simon Parke

For Wendy and Sam, the best rule was "everything has a home." We made a list of their main household items and where they went - for example, pill bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, laundry in the hamper, and food in the kitchen cabinets. This may seem like a fundamental rule that everyone learns as a child, but many hoarders didn't pick that up either because they grew up in hoarding houses themselves, or they grew up in traumatic households where finding a meal and avoiding a beating was a daily reality. Cleaning was the least of their worries. — Matt Paxton

If you are reading this Libellus, you are a Dreamer, whether you have recognized this or not. Being a Dreamer carries responsibility, one most people are not willing to accept. Responsibility implies that one cannot blame another person for their actions, effectively avoiding causality. However, this is futile and childish to consider. If you are a Dreamer, you are creating the Waking Dream around you. If your life is good, it is because you have made it so and if it is bad, it is because you have made it so. No one else is responsible for your life other than you. — Michael Hibbard

[...]avoiding mistakes, looking for a way to make life perfect isn't reality. Reality is mistakes, failures, and heartache. — Kristen Kehoe

I have long held firm to my suspicion that some people are just evil. In some cases I'll concede it seems as though it is thrust upon someone who had little real hope of avoiding it. However tragic that reality, the simple fact remains that it is more important to protect the rest of society for as long as it remains a danger to them. — Jeremy Kyle

But this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time. — Deirdre Madden

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background. — Sigmund Freud

IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality. — Ellen Burstyn

Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. Emotional health is facing reality at any cost. — M. Scott Peck

I'm not forcing you to do anything. You need to make your own damn decisions . And I'm not playing this game where we ignore reality and pretend to have a normal conversation for a few hours. You need to face reality and stop turning life into a movie. I'm not a puppet in your show. This is real life and you're always trying to ignore it for some cheap fantasy version where no problems exist. That's not noble of you, okay? You're not strong. You're a weak person like the rest of us. You've just learned to excel at avoiding issues. But there are issues . Life has so many freaking issues and if you can't force your own self to face life and make decisions without someone telling you what the hell to do, you're just going to end up another chess piece moved around by others. — Marilyn Grey

This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God. — Paul Tillich

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. — Ayn Rand

We don't live in a shared reality, we each live in a reality of our own, and causing upset is often the price of trying to reach each other. It's always easier to dismiss other people than to go through the awkward and time consuming process of understanding them. We have given 'taking offense' a social status it doesn't deserve: it's not much more than a way of avoiding difficult conversations. — Frankie Boyle

Since the 1970s, analyses of the public debt have suffered from the fact that economists have probably relied too much on so-called representative agent models, that is, models in which each agent is assumed to earn the same income and to be endowed with the same amount of wealth (and thus to own the same quantity of government bonds). Such a simplification of reality can be useful at times in order to isolate logical relations that are difficult to analyze in more complex models. Yet by totally avoiding the issue of inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, these models often lead to extreme and unrealistic conclusions and are therefore a source of confusion rather than clarity. — Anonymous

Travelling', she sighed.'So predictable.'
'What's wrong with travelling?'
'Avoiding reality more like.'
'I think reality is over-rated,' he said in the hope that this might come across as dark and charismatic. — David Nicholls

The best fiction is often how we interpret our own lives and what we see as our common due. It is created usually as a means of avoiding reality which, if seriously considered, might negate our ability to strive for what might seem impossible. — Anne Edwards

If you can not call out bigotry, corruption, racism, sexism, xenophobia, islamophobia, ageism, agnosticism, imperialism, antiblackism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, terrorism, egoism, and totalitarianism; then you are encouraging it to grow. There is no retreat from all the "isms" conflicts with which we must cope.

The most fecund killer of innocent in all of human history is not a disease or natural catastrophe. It is rooted in a sick way of thinking in which we have been programmed. Avoiding the quandary isn't helpful. A public discussion of these challenges could open up a new dialogue of approach. Without, this is the reality that the next generation would have to live with. — Henry Johnson Jr

Avoiding awareness of our own reality is often an attempt to deny thoughts, desires, or intentions that we feel will threaten or contradict the needs of those with whom we feel strong attachment. We instinctively hide feelings and thoughts we assume would be threatening to other people, and might cause them to leave us. . . People who learned early in life to adapt to parental needs to an extent that we were unable to focus on our own developmental tasks and needs will often continue to play out this working mode" of conditional attachment. "You will attach to me as long as I meet your needs. — Mary Crocker Cook

Kicking the can down the road implies that we're accepted the galling reality that whatever it is that we've avoiding, it's something that's not going to go away; at least on its own. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope which brings about change, which produces new realities, is what opens man's road to freedom. Once hope has taken hold, courage must unite with wisdom. That is the only way of avoiding violence, the only way of maintaining the calm one needs to respond peacefully to offenses. — Oscar Arias

It's nothing more than a mental habit to idealize another time, another condition, another reality. It is simply a way to avoid the reality of our lives right now. And in avoiding the reality of our present circumstances, we avoid the miracles they offer. Everyone does it because that's the way the ego mind works. But we can stare down this self-defeating habit and cultivate a truer perspective: that wherever we are is the perfect place, and whatever time it is now is the perfect time. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't improve things, particularly ourselves. But indulging the thought that if only we were somewhere else things would be better is a surefire way to experience pain. — Marianne Williamson

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help. — Milan Kundera

Procrastination is your way of avoiding your fantasy of reality. — Gloria Arenson

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It is easy to imagine that the Buddha, the awakened one, is something or somewhere other than here or that awakening to reality will happen sometime other than now. But as long as we continue to think in terms of time we will deceive ourselves. The you who is chasing enlightenment will never become enlightened.
Instead of striving towards some distant goal that you will never reach, I invite you to stop and ask: How am I avoiding the enlightenment that is already present in each moment? How am I seeing separation where it doesn't exist? — Adyashanti

After 'Chandni Bar' there was a shutdown of such bars in Mumbai. After 'Page 3' people started avoiding such events. 'Traffic Signal' exposed the money flow through the mafia. I'm not apologetic about the brutal truth in my films. Almost 70% of my films are based on reality, and 30% I fictionalize or change to suit my film. — Madhur Bhandarkar

Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux. — Felix Guattari

Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of "good" and "bad" in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast "people like us" as basically good and "people like them" as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an "axis of evil" and then to go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and "the other lot" into demons; we "demonize" our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding having to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior. — N. T. Wright

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within. — Rollo May

For most people, blaming others is a subconscious mechanism for avoiding accountability. In reality, the only thing in your way is YOU. — Steve Maraboli