In no way did I allow reality as it was to intrude on reality as I wanted it to be.
It's a noisy environment we all live in, whether it's traffic or the workplace, so it's very difficult to think about your life in general. A lot of people are afraid to do that. They like to hide behind their work and not face up to a big problem in their life.
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.
Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it
Fluency avoids hard thoughts.
To tell you the truth, I've just been avoiding everything.
I don't know what I believe in. I try not to think about it. I don't want to think about it.
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
It seemed better to delay thinking.
Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.
I won't think of it now. I can't stand it now. I'll think of it later.
I bury things in the back of my mind I don't really want to deal with.
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.
Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.
Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
We know how often in our lives through laziness and cowardice we give up the battle and try to hypnotise our minds into the belief that we are brave.
People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.
The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.
I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.
The system [of thought] doesn't stay with the difficult problem that produces unpleasant feelings. It's conditioned somehow to move as fast as it can toward more pleasant feelings, without actually facing the thing that's making the unpleasant feeling.
You're using your headphones to drown out your mind
I actually believe in denial.
Some people stay in the academic world just to avoid becoming self-aware. You can quote me on that.
