Mary Roach Quotes

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

I do a lot of thinking about my work while I'm walking. More in the early morning when I'm trekking in the mountains. When I'm walking in the city, I think more about people around me - my brothers, my wife, some business situation, commitments.

You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you'll start walking pretty weird.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

When I was in lower school, I graduated from fourth grade, and the principal gave us a summer assignment to take a 30-minute reflection period every day. And, of course, there were no cell phones at the time. She said to just think. And that's lost. It doesn't exist anymore. Just imagine being on a couch and just thinking.

Technology is notorious for engrossing people so much that they don't always focus on balance and enjoy life at the same time.

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

Let's sink another drink, cause it will give me time to think.

Most people when they're walking are thinking about where they have to go and what they have to do. But that removes us from happiness.

I think the church needs to be much more countercultural than that and invite people into slowing down, into a "Be-still-and-know-that-I-am-God" mindset.

The difference between me and many young people is, I don't carry music with me. I like to think. I don't use any modern convenience to be talking to other people, because I like my time to think. I go to the garden in the morning, and this time, I'm thinking ideas, I'm not drawing, I'm thinking.

I love computers. I love writing on them. I love gadgetry. The thing is: I am a slow reader. So, if I am going to get my work done, I read, like, a newspaper and that's it. If I got into websites and the internet, I wouldn't get any work done.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

Let us take a little time to meditate, to think of what we can do to improve our lives and to become better examples of what a Latter-day Saint should be.

All these things, social media or [smart] phones or the things that distract us from each other, are fairly new. They're all fairly new inventions, and I think we're in a stage where we sort of as a whole have gotten these new toys and we're just obsessed with playing with them. I feel like after a period of adjustment it will inevitably be a regression from where we are now.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

Sometimes I sits and thinks. Other times I sits and drinks, but mostly I just sits.

You see people walking down the street with ear buds on and looking at this or whatever, talking to themselves. So there's more and more opportunity to never be where we actually are and just be.

Never did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much as in the journeys I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my body must be in motion to move my mind.

How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

Prayer, to the thinking person, is almost inescapable.

In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Only the thinking man lives his life, the thoughtless man's life passes him by.

Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.