avoid

If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.

Driving your car through deep pools of flood water is a great way of making your car unreliable. Smart people turn around and avoid it.

I advise people to avoid workplaces that prevent Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) visits.

People should avoid hatred at all costs, because not only does it affect the hater__ health; it also prevents them from enjoying the goodness of love.

Is the goal I__e set been determined by a desire to avoid the goal I should have set?

I often ask to what place I am running, for if I am unable to identify that place it is likely that I am running in a circle of the most circular sort.

Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence.

Avoid fear because it will blind you from seeing God__ purpose about your life and limit your potential.

Mediocrity is a path cleared by fear, leveled by apathy and paved by comfort.

The choice to avoid risk is the choice to avoid living, and to avoid living is one of the greatest risk of all.

I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.

Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?

To __retend_ is to say that I__ willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I__ unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren__ true.

To understand this new frontier, I will have to try to master one of the most difficult and counterintuitive theories ever recorded in the annals of science: quantum physics. Listen to those who have spent their lives immersed in this world and you will have a sense of the challenge we face. After making his groundbreaking discoveries in quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg recalled, "I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" Einstein declared after one discovery, "If it is correct it signifies the end of science." Schrödinger was so shocked by the implications of what he'd cooked up that he admitted, "I do not like it and I am sorry I had anything to do with it." Nevertheless, quantum physics is now one of the most powerful and well-tested pieces of science on the books. Nothing has come close to pushing it off its pedestal as one of the great scientific achievements of the last century. So there is nothing to do but to dive headfirst into this uncertain world. Feynman has some good advice for me as I embark on my quest: "I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

An act of violence, no matter how small, can never be justified if it can be avoided.

If you really want to grow great, you need to avoid costly pleasures and preserve your future treasures.

We have to continually grow in the knowledge of Christ, in order to avoid every limitation of our human understanding, and allow the Lordship of God__ information, which is hidden in His wisdom

Fitness needs to be perceived as fun and games or we subconsciously avoid it.