Avoided By Favourite Person Quotes

My humble...I don't drink...' 'A shame! What about a game of dice, then? Or do have some other favourite game? Dominoes? Cards? 'I don't play games,' the already weary barman responded. 'Altogether bad,' the host concluded. 'As you will, but there's something noce nice hidden in men who avoid wine, games, the society of charming women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate everybody around them. True, there may be exceptions. Among persons sitting down with me at the banqueting table, there have been on occasion some extraordinary scoundrels! Chapter 18

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need at least to investigate carefully our favourite sources of information – be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network or a person. In Chapter 20 we will explore in far greater depth how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb. First, if you want reliable information – pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: ‘I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange, you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.’ Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: ‘You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service. The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has got many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think that the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim.

Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush. Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.

No one wants to suffer. But much as we would all like to live a totally happy life, suffering is an inescapable fact of our human existence. The observation that ‘Man is born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward’ may not have been much consolation to Job but, nevertheless, remains an uncomfortable truth. Generally speaking, suffering arises through our encounters with problems and difficulties; this is why much of our time is spent trying to avoid them, even though they are inherent in life. In trying to avoid problems, however, we are often simply putting off the inevitable to a future date, by which time the trouble has usually grown much more difficult to resolve. Personal relationships are a good example of this. The failure to tackle a problem between two people — a clash of desires, for instance – usually for fear of not knowing what the consequences will be, or perhaps simply because of a dislike of conflict, can very easily lead to a build-up of resentments which, when finally expressed, can be immensely destructive. The story of the ‘mild-mannered’ civil servant who, in 1987, was jailed for strangling his wife after twenty-six years of marriage, ostensibly because she simply moved his favourite mustard from its usual place at the dinner table, is an extreme, but true, example of this.

Being single is wonderful! Doing whatever you want whenever you want to — nothing beats that. Some of my personal favourites are finding the food you left in the fridge is still there when you get home, not having to compromise, sleeping diagonally in the bed, never dealing with your partner’s mood swings, and not having to pretend to be asleep to avoid having sex when you’re not in the mood. Another part of my relationship phobia was letting a new person get to know me. I’m not talking about the surface me — I’m talking about the bad-breath-in-the morning, clip-my-toenails-on-the-toilet, farting, and head-tie-wearing me. To be loved, you have to let a person see all of you — that means both the best and the worst. My fear was whether, when they saw the worst, they would actually want to stay.

The greenette opened his eyes and gazed at them with a happy smile. "I know. This is my favourite quirk. It's beautiful right?" "It is." said Todoroki, but he wasn't looking at organic alcove, but at the person who created it. Bakugou stared around in a poorly concealed attempt to avoid looking at Izuku, "this is some Disney princess shit.

If I may be permitted the indulgence of another of my favourite pictures, it is that of a seaside bay. With a small boat, and the tide low, one has to be extremely careful not to strike barely submerged rocks, and has to navigate with caution among the visible obstructions. The situation is by no means carefree; it could be damaging to one’s craft, even dangerous to one’s person.Yet, a few hours later, with a full tide, the whole scene is transformed. The menacing rocks are now at least several feet below one’s keel, and one may sail freely within the area. This has more than incidental parallels with James C. Thomson’s concept, which he named High Level Health. Not mere absence or avoidance of uncomfortable symptoms, but a genuine freedom to live and move fully

Road signs warned motorists of the dangers of the Himalayas in a language that would have bordered on hilarious, were it not for the content. They read like a dark comedy with bad English. ‘Follow traffic rules, avoid blood pools.’ ‘If married, divorce speed.’ ‘After whisky, driving risky.’ ‘This is a highway not a runway’. And my personal favourite: ‘Better mister late than late mister.