These diversion quotes will inspire you. Diversion is an instance of turning something aside from its course.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging diversion quotes, diversion sayings, and diversion proverbs.
Best Diversion Quotes
- “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” ~ Adam Smith
- “Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.” ~ George Jean Nathan
- “We were meant to grow. When we don’t grow, we seek diversions–some harmless (if unproductive), others destructive–to fill the emptiness.” ~ Jim Clemmer
- “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ~ Khalil Gibran
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“When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.” ~ Ian Mcewan
- “Diversion and indifference are the two widest roads to Hell in today’s world.” ~ Peter Kreeft
- “If our condition were truly happy, we would not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy.” ~ Blaise Pascal
- “But teaching is like climbing a mountain.” ~ Fawn M. Brodie
- “Successful leaders develop effective strategies for maintaining their boundaries. … Most time bandits don’t know any better. And being a time bandit is a matter of context. One person’s time bandit is another person’s pleasant diversion. … Instead of gritting our teeth to be polite and resenting the time bandit for holding us up, the best choice is to be honest. We cannot expect another person to honor our needs unless we affirm them ourselves.” ~ Diane Dreher
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“How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.” ~ Luciano Pavarotti
- “I believe certain members of the U.S. Congress have aided in the oppression and diversion of critical information that could have revealed a fullness of truth long ago.” ~ Bo Gritz
- “Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “Iraq is no diversion. It is a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, we must not waver.” ~ George W. Bush
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“Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.” ~ Fawn M. Brodie
- “Pop flies, in a sense, are just a diversion for a second baseman. Grounders are his stock trade.” ~ Jackie Robinson
- “I was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested, but I went into a diversion programme, and by that time I’d already begun working in what was called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment.” ~ David Soul
- “There’s a diversion between economic reality – integration, global village, everybody depending on everybody else – and cultural reality, which is people feeling invaded, undermined, threatened, wanting to have “stand-your-ground” legislation all over the place. It’s alarming because at the moment, the fear is outweighing the benefits, and that’s partially because the benefits have been so unequally distributed that lots of people don’t feel better off. They feel threatened, angry and despairing.” ~ Duncan Green
- “It gave me a great notion of the credit of our present government and administration, to find people press as eagerly to pay money as they would to receive it; and, at the same time, a due respect for that body of men who have found out so pleasing an expedient for carrying on the common cause, that they have turned a tax into a diversion.” ~ Gertrude Stein
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“Courting Peggy McGrath provided me with a very pleasant diversion and eventually with the most important relationship of my life.” ~ David Rockefeller
- “The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.” ~ William Carlos Williams
- “It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion.” ~ Herman Melville
- “The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children’s school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio, and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality.” ~ Lewis Mumford
- “Although reading the classics in Latin in school maybe not as fulfilling as it would be at a more mature age, few scientists can afford the time for such diversion later in life.” ~ George Andrew Olah
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“Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.” ~ Jerry B. Jenkins
- “The United States government first learned of the diversion of the W-88 nuclear warhead design in late 1995.” ~ Charles Bass
- “I believe the main solution is to gain the trust of Europe and America and to remove their concerns over the peaceful nature of our nuclear industry and to assure them that there will never be a diversion to military use.” ~ Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
- “It’s such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.” ~ Danica McKellar
- “Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.” ~ Joseph Addison
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“The mind gets distracted in all sorts of ways. The heart is its own exclusive concern and diversion.” ~ Malcolm De Chazal
- “Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.” ~ Blaise Pascal
- “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.” ~ Blaise Pascal
- “The committee discloses that even after the U.S. government learned of the diversion of U.S. designs for nuclear warheads in late 1995, the Clinton Administration failed to take steps immediately to improve security.” ~ Charles Bass
- “This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don’t want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.” ~ David Brooks
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“Everything that is good in the arts is done by some sort of diversion.” ~ John Roecker
- “If I can in any way contribute to the Diversion or Improvement of the Country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the secret Satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain.” ~ Joseph Addison
- “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.” ~ Adam Smith
- “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.” ~ Mary Wortley Montagu
- “The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.” ~ Frank Herbert
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“Recreation and diversion are as necessary to our well-being as the more serious pursuits of life.” ~ Brigham Young
- “An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.” ~ Isabel Paterson
- “Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.” ~ Blaise Pascal
- “Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “The only thing which consoles for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us imperceptibly ruin ourselves.” ~ Blaise Pascal
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“When one has a famishing thirst for happiness, one is apt to gulp down diversions wherever they are offered.” ~ Alice Hegan Rice
- “Without [diversion] we would be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us on to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.” ~ Blaise Pascal
- “I trust the mystery. I trust what comes in silence and what comes in nature where there’s no diversion. I think the lack of stimulation allows us to hear and experience a deeper river that’s constant, still, vibrant, and real. And the process of deep listening with attention and intention catalyzes and mobilizes exactly what’s needed at that time.” ~ Angeles Arrien
- “It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?’…If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time-the stuff of life” ~ Carl Sandburg
- “If you have a clear goal and a plan to achieve it, your focus is fixed on a set course of action. Instead of becoming sidetracked by distractions and diversions, your time is focused on a straight line from start to finish.” ~ Brian Tracy
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“I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.” ~ Michel de Montaigne
- “We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery – it recharges by running.” ~ Bill Watterson , Mind diversion quotes
- “The best-kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.” ~ John W. Gardner
- “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker – a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten.” ~ Anne Frank
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“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.” ~ Walker Percy
- “Happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in being stirred up. This instinct conflicts with the drive to diversion, and we develop the confused idea that leads people to aim at rest through excitement.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Laziness begat wearisomeness, and this put men in quest of diversions, play and company, on which however it is a constant attendant; he who works hard, has enough to do with himself otherwise.” ~ Jean de la Bruyere
- “Baseball is a diversion. It is therapy. It takes peoples minds off of everything that has happened, if just for a while.” ~ George Pataki
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“…to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.” ~ Aldo Leopold
- “The true danger is the expansion of empire and the huge diversion of public budgets overseas at the neglect of domestic necessities, including, for example, a major public works program to employ millions of people. The Democrats want that. The Republicans may be pressured from back home to want it, but it hasn’t happened yet under the Obama administration.” ~ Ralph Nader
- “I am very much concerned when I see young gentlemen of fortune and quality so wholly set upon pleasures and diversions, that they neglect all those improvements in wisdom and knowledge which may make them easy to themselves and useful to the world.” ~ Joseph Addison
- “The MMI brothers, who provided security for Malcolm X had been trained by Malcolm himself that inside of the Nation of Islam, whenever there is a diversion, you protect the principal. The principal, in this case Malcolm, clearly was not protected on February 21st [1965].” ~ Manning Marable
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“Anything is possible when tackling a blank sheet with ink. It’s less distracting because I’m away from my computer and all of its convenient diversions.” ~ Brian Pinkerton
- “The library is a place of mental diversion, learning, and comfort for anyone who has an intellect. I know of no librarian who when asked for food for the mind will offer a stone. What more could anyone ask?” ~ Piers Anthony
- “I used to wonder: Is Huxley right or is Orwell right? It turns out they’re both right. First you get the new world state and endless diversions as you are disempowered. And then, as we are watching, credit dries up, and the cheap manufactured goods of the consumer society are no longer cheap. Then you get the iron fist of Oceania, of Orwell’s 1984.” ~ Chris Hedges
