Avoids Quotes & Sayings

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management. — James F. Cooper

There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls - it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? - Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem "The Wall Within" by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. "The Wall Within" was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record. — Kevin Sites

The best martial artist doesn't win fights, but avoids fights. Martial arts is a way of gaining basic self-mastery of your mind, body and emotions. It can also be very useful in combat situations. — Frederick Lenz

If one avoids haughtiness to the utmost extent and is exceedingly humble, he is termed a saint, and this is the standard of saintliness. — Maimonides

A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction ... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration. — Wayne Thiebaud

A soul does not benefit from the sacrament of confession if it is not humble. Pride keeps it in darkness. The soul neither knows how, nor is it willing, to probe with precision the depths of its own misery. It puts on a mask and avoids everything that might bring it recovery. — Mary Faustina Kowalska

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone. — Sigmund Freud

Gilles Duceppe avoids making campaign promises altogether so he can emphasize that his Bloc Quebecois has only one objective: to prevent Harper from forming a majority government. — Martin O'Malley

Another sign of the learned man of the hereafter is that he keeps himself distant from the ruling authorities and avoids their company, because this world is sweet, ever-new and its bridle is in their hands. He who comes near them is not free from their pleasures and harms. They are mostly unjust and do not obey the advices of the learned men. The learned man who frequents them will look to their grandeurs and then think God's gift upon him as insignificant. To keep company with the rulers is the key to evils. — Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it. — Margaret Atwood

Safe Sex
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge — Donald Hall

The Prophet's life is an invitation to a spirituality that avoids no question and teaches us - in the course of events, trials, hardships, and our quest - that the true answers to existential questions are more often those given by the heart than by the intelligence. Deeply, simply: he who cannot love cannot understand. — Tariq Ramadan

If we look forward to a future in which mankind behaves rationally and avoids self-destruction, we can visualize a world that will be more complicated than the one we know today, but a world that will run better and, most of all, a world in which the individual will count for more, not less. — Isaac Asimov

One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings. — Michael Moorcock

Have you ever dealt with people who have lost everything in just an hour? In the morning you leave the house where your wife, your children, your parents live. You return and you find a smoking pit. Then something happens to you - to a certain extent you stop being human. You do not need any glory, money anymore; revenge becomes your only joy. And because you no longer cling to life, death avoids you, the bullets fly past. You become a wolf. — Russian General Aleksander Lebed

It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process. — Larry Harvey

Good planning avoids the need for fixing up a project that plowed ahead without thought ... about potential pitfalls. — Bobby Knight

The True Person avoids extremes, self-indulgence, and extravagance. — Laozi

My work is drawn to the political but avoids an agenda. There is no inherent critique or support. — Taryn Simon

In my work, it's simultaneously realities, instead of parallel. Simultaneous avoids the problem of alternate reality. In parallel reality, there's always a hierarchy, and there doesn't necessarily have to be a hierarchy. When you're in a palace like Blenheim, you're supposed to be in awe - why not be in awe of something different than the stuff they're showing you? It's about finding your own existential place. — Lawrence Weiner

We cross the expansive, bustling lobby of the hotel toward the entrance, but Grey avoids the revolving door, and I wonder if that's because he'd have to let go of my hand. — E.L. James

Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses and avoids. — Aristotle.

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works. — Bill Gates

Men are hard-wired for risk taking - particularly young men. The number one killer of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old males is accidents.6 Female investors hold less risky investment portfolios than their male counterparts and generally take fewer chances with their money.
Churches need men because men are natural risk takers - and they bring that orientation into the church. Congregations that do not take risks atrophy. Jesus made it clear that risk taking is necessary to please God. In the parable of the talents, the master praises two servants who risked their assets and produced more, but he curses the servant who played it safe. He who avoids all risk is, in the words of Jesus, "wicked and lazy". — David Murrow

All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep. She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that is soaked. — Victor Hugo

I can definitely tell when mum has got money because then she likes to go shopping to spend it, whereas dad is steadier and avoids splurges. I like to think I've inherited both sides. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

A clever general, therefore, avoids an army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish and inclined to return. — Sun Tzu

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague. — Edsger Dijkstra

It's true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive." -Judy Collins — Genna Rulon

An intellectual is someone who avoids the mundane by lowering his handicap. — Richard Reeves

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting. — Mason Cooley

To seek pleasure, to avoid pain, is the general line of action (some would say law) of the organic world. Without this quest of the agreeable, life itself would be impossible. Organisms would disintegrate, life cease. Thus whatever a man's actions and line of conduct may be, he does what he does in obedience to a craving of his nature. The most repulsive actions, no less than actions which are indifferent or most attractive, are all equally dictated by a need of the individual who performs them. Let him act as he may, the individual acts as he does because he finds a pleasure in it, or avoids, or thinks he avoids, a pain. Here we have a well-established fact. Here we have the essence of what has been called the egoistic theory. — Pyotr Kropotkin

In Hamlet, the hero hates his Uncle King Claudius so much that he avoids killing him while Claudius is praying in church, because Hamlet believes that anyone, no matter how sinful, who dies while he is praying, will go to his reward in Heaven rather than Hell. He hates Claudius enough to let him live, rather than assure him of entry to Heaven, no matter how painful that entry may be. — Elliot S! Maggin

Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It's easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion. — John C. Maxwell

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal. — Daniel Berrigan

Although secular fundamentalist "progressives" might believe in a future "golden age," such an age does not exist. The future that they herald is merely one of gathering gloom and ever darkening clouds. This fate has ever been so for those who proclaim their "Pride." They have nothing to expect in the future but their fall.
As for the Christian, he has nothing to fear but his falling into the pride of despair. If he avoids becoming despondent and retains his humility, he will receive the gift of hope which is its fruit. Where there is hope there is the Way, the Truth and the Life. — Joseph Pearce

First of all, it's friendship with God that makes possible friendship with one another in a manner that is not that we just like one another, but that were are joined by common judgments, by God, for the good of God's church. Such friendship occurs not by trying to be each other's friend, but by discovering you were engaged in common good work that is so determinative, you cannot live without one another. Now, if the church is that, it will talk about friendship in a way that avoids the superficiality of the language of relationship. Because relationships are meant to be spontaneous and short. Friendship, if it is the friendship of God, is to be characterized by fidelity in which you are even willing to tell the friend the truth. Which may mean you will risk the friendship. You need to be in that kind of community to survive the loneliness that threatens all of our souls. — Stanley Hauerwas

I sat silently for several minutes, resisting the urge to speak, knowing it was stupid. There was nothing left of my father. Even if there were, it was ridiculous to believe it would be here, hovering around ashes and dust, jostling for position among the souls of the hundreds of thousands of others buried in this place. People lay the flowers and say the prayers, they believe these things, because doing so avoids the discomfort of acknowledging that the person you loved is gone. It's easier to believe that maybe the person can still see and hear and care. — Barry Eisler

Blessed is he or she who avoids being offended. — Marvin J. Ashton

Weapons are never the implements of good fortune, and they are to be detested. Therefore, the wise leader avoids them. Normally the wise leader values patience, but when at war he values action. Since he is opposed to the use of weapons, he uses them only when it is unavoidable, and even then with great restraint. To praise victory in war is to rejoice in the slaughter of men. The slaughter of men causes grief and sorrow to the people, therefore he who rejoices in this will not be successful. Fortune follows the restrained, misfortune follows the ambitious. Therefore victory in war should not be celebrated, but instead should be met with mourning. — Lao-Tzu

As a flower plucked from a tree gradually droops and shrivels, love that avoids the harsh realities of practical life cannot thrive on its own resources. — Rabindranath Tagore

To a great extent the world is what we make it. We get back what we give. If we sow hate, we reap hate; if we scatter love and gentleness we harvest love and happiness. Other people are like a mirror which reflects back on us the kind of image we cast. The kind person bears with the infirmities of others, never magnifies trifles, and avoids a spirit of fault finding. — Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Even if, as is generally the case, everything that the ad says about the product is scrupulously honest, or at any rate scrupulously avoids outright dishonesty, the implication of the direct address of most commercials - that the announcer speaks with the viewer's welfare at heart - is fraudulent. — Michael Schudson

Perfect reason avoids all extremes. — Moliere

So, anything that avoids a conflict that could draw in, unhappily again, outside powers such as the United States or revisit, for example, Japan's interests in the Taiwan area would be the last thing that anyone would want. — William Kirby

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind; Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily; Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness; Sometimes one is up and sometimes down. Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency. — Laozi

The coldest day in fall
is at the Hallows Evening ball
where ghoulish fun
avoids the sun
as monsters mingle wall to wall. — Richelle E. Goodrich

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We think a wise person is someone who solves problems. Truth is, a wise person is someone who avoids problems. — Prem Rawat

In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the government in a matter of years has put a lot of energy behind recycling food waste as livestock feed. It's environmentally friendly, it provides cheap livestock feed for the farmers in those parts of the world, and it avoids sending the food waste to landfill. — Tristram Stuart

He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. He tries not to sentimentalize the animals he kills, or to sentimentalize Bev Shaw. He avoids saying to her 'I don't know how you do it,' in order not to have to hear her say in return, 'Someone has to do it. — J.M. Coetzee

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own--those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy--precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations. — Charles Krauthammer

There is no difference between knowledge and temperance; for he who knows what is good and embraces it, who knows what is bad and avoids it, is learned and temperate. — Socrates

As for me, I am unfortunate enough not to posses a happy temperament like Najdorf, who views every happening in a rosy light and avoids any possibility of self-criticism. I am one of those unlucky skeptics who never overlook the dark side of even the happiest experience. — Savielly Tartakower

A clever general ... avoids an army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish and inclined to return. This is the art of studying moods. Disciplined and calm, he awaits the appearance of disorder and hubbub among the enemy. This is the art of retaining self-possession. — Sun Tzu

Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Then it's just Venia, whose skin is so pale her tattoos appear to be leaping off it. Almost rigid with determination, she does my hair and nails and makeup, fingers flying swiftly to compensate for her absent teammates. The whole time, she avoids my gaze. It's only when Cinna shows up to approve me and dismiss her that she takes my hands, looks me straight in the eye, and says, "We would all like you to know what a ... privilege it has been to make you look your best." Then she hastens from the room. — Suzanne Collins

Everything that liberals want they call a civil right. This avoids them having to argue about it and puts the halo around the issue. — Ann Coulter

She has never understood, nor been able to relate to a herd mentality. She doesn't get along with followers and avoids the bandwagon. She marches to her own tune and does it alone. She's despised by the weak-minded and respected by the strong. She ruffles the feathers of the flock because she champion's the defenseless and pick's on the mob. Does she wish she could not give a damn and live an ordinary life surrounded by nodding and needy ordinary people? At times ... but she'd be bored out of her mind when she's never bored alone, and because of that she's patient because a couple of times in a lifetime she's lucky enough to come across a memorable, magnetic and remarkable person - one worth knowing, even if just for the brevity of a conversation. — Donna Lynn Hope

Leap out the window, my inner Tigress cried. You aren't ready to face such a powerful Tiger. I frowned. I thought a true Tigress never backed down from a fight. Don't you know anything? When she's in heat, she avoids everything male. Now run! — Gena Showalter

A lady always avoids the truth, when it happens to be gauche. — Courtney Milan

An army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness. — Sun Tzu

Unfinishedness avoids the stupidity of conclusions — Pierre Senges

He that lives alone lives in danger; society avoids many dangers. — Marcus Aurelius

Experience hobbles progress and leads to abandonment of difficult problems; it encourages the initiated to walk on the shady side of the street in the direction of experiences that have been pleasant. Youth without experience attacks the unsolved problems which maturer age with experience avoids, and from the labors of youth comes progress. Youth has dreams and visions, and will not be denied. — William James Mayo

The girl with a future avoids a man with a past. — Evan Esar

The non-violent resistor not only avoids external, physical violence, but he avoids internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he refuses to hate him. And he stands with understanding, goodwill at all times. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Collective problems must be solved by all of us, collectively, and no one finds inner peace who avoids doing his or her share in the solving of collective problems. — Peace Pilgrim

Surely it is the one who fears he is wrong who avoids criticism. The one who is sure he is right invites it. It only illuminates the strength of beliefs and makes them more available to others. — David L. Wolfe

The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. — Sharon Salzberg

We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer," he writes in "The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry," "a sexual partner, an 'other-directed' executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of film, years of TV time; that such a man has somehow betrayed his destiny as a human being. — Scott Stossel

The wise man avoids evil by anticipating it. — Publilius Syrus

Religion idolizes concepts and avoids personal experience. — Bill Johnson

He who avoids misunderstandings,
Amused at the play of his own mind,
Is ever joyful. — Milarepa

Trying to attract another underserved audience group - females - brought Super Princess Peach, a game where Peach finally avoids being princess-napped. Bowser kidnaps Mario and Luigi instead, and it's up to her for once to save them. The second-wave feminism lasts as long as it takes Peach to acquire a magical talking parasol. Peach's powers manifest through her emotional states. When she is calm she can heal herself, when she is happy she can fly, when glum she can water plants with her tears, and when angry she literally catches on fire. Using emotions as part of basic game play is a daring concept, and feel free to sub in "insulting" or "outrageous" or "awesome" for "daring." The concept might have been taken more seriously if not for touches like the pink umbrella, and Peach having unlimited lives - core gamers hate being unable to die. — Jeff Ryan

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it. — Frantz Fanon

A Superwoman isn't a woman who can do anything, but a woman who avoids doing too much. — Shirley Conran

Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained. — Arthur Cayley

To the wise, a prick on the finger avoids a hole in the heart. — Donita K. Paul

Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Abdur Rab offers a comprehensive vision of Islam using the Quran as his sole religious textual source. He intentionally avoids the hadith literature, which he believes, and argues, has done much damage to the message of the Quran. His work provides many thought-provoking insights and should be a significant contribution to the 'Quran only' movement in modern Islam. — Jeffrey Lang

You'll never meet a guy who avoids recklessness and abandon like I do. — Reki Kawahara

For the past 10 years I have had the interesting experience of observing the development of Parkinson's syndrome on myself. As a matter of fact, this condition does not come under my special medical interests or I would have had it solved long ago. ... The condition has its compensations: one is not yanked from interesting work to go to the jungles of Burma ... one avoids all kinds of deadly committee meetings, etc. — Fuller Albright

Where possible Paul avoids quoting the teaching of Jesus, in fact even mentioning it. If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the sermon on the mount, and had taught His disciples the 'Our Father.' Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over the words of the Lord. — Albert Schweitzer

He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Every young woman should dress well, that is, neatly, tastefully, modestly, whether she be rich or poor. Conspicuous dressing is vulgar. True refinement avoids anything showy and flashy: it never dresses better than it can afford, and yet it is always well dressed, even in simple muslin or plain calico. — J.R. Miller

Science, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics. Thus, in my relations with you, I am not a totally good person or a bad person but a person who sometimes treats you well and sometimes treats you badly. Instead of viewing world events in a rigid, absolute way, science assumes that such events, and especially human affairs, usually follow the laws of probability. — Albert Ellis

I would say I am very much more interested in ethics than in code/ morality. I think it's in this way that one avoids the conservatism inherent in "the moral". — Richard Marshall

An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes. — Warren Buffett

Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject. — Plato

We usually say things we mean when we speak without thinking; they just tend to get us in more trouble because they lack the editing that softens the blow or avoids the point. — Christin Lovell

Let a man avoid evil deeds as a man who loves life avoids poison. — Gautama Buddha

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it ... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses. — Nelson Shanks

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. — Albert Einstein

This is our culture, and I don't care who the musician is, if he avoids black people, then he is scared of something. He doesn't have confidence in himself or else he doesn't believe in what he's doing. — Betty Carter

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this. — Rose Macaulay

A peaceful life doesn't mean one that has no conflict or struggle ... a life that avoids conflict never changes. We must live making sounds like the stream of water ... we can produce beautiful sounds in our lives by colliding with obstacles. — Ilchi Lee

You will go on blundering, for only he who does nothing avoids errors. — Janusz Korczak