Blaise Pascal Quotes

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.

If I don't think about it, it won't drive me crazy.

People don't want to hear the truth; they never do. They wanna live in some kind of fantasy.

Sometimes, America, when something's too bad, we don't want to look at it. We want to turn our head.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

He was so tenacious he defied the distraction of women by refusing to have them in his presence, just as later in life he denied his blindness by calling for more and more candles.

I think people, whether they realize they're doing it or not, seek out distractions to take their minds off what they know is bad behavior.

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

Between knowing and not knowing is not wanting to know.

Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.

Society is much like the ostrich with its head in the sand. It will not look at facts and face the responsibility of its own stupidity.

In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.

The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.

We are a culture of people who've bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won't catch up with us.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them. And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

The truth. Men will blind themselves with hot irons, rather than face it.

It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that.

Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

The only the way that you can live and function without seeing the facts in front of you is to put yourself in a constant state of denial.

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.