Distraction Quotes (7 quotes)
I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.
Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Quoted in interview for PBS TV program Nova. In William Byers, How Mathematicians Think (2007), 1.
It is a matter of primary importance in the cultivation of those sciences in which truth is discoverable by the human intellect that the investigator should be free, independent, unshackled in his movement; that he should be allowed and enabled to fix his mind intently, nay, exclusively, on his special object, without the risk of being distracted every other minute in the process and progress of his inquiry by charges of temerariousness, or by warnings against extravagance or scandal.
In The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (1905), 471.
Now I will have less distraction.
Quoted as said upon losing the use of his right eye. In Howard Eves, Mathematical Circles (1969). Webmaster has not yet found a primary source. Can you help?
Present experience is a dream; the future a distraction; only memory can unlock the meaning of life.
In 'Thomas Hardy', Saturday Review of Literature (1 Dec 1928), 5, 422. Rearranged by Anne Ellis for epigraph to Chap. 1 as “The present is a distraction; the future a dream; only memory can unlock the meaning of life” in Plain Anne Ellis: More About the Life of an Ordinary Woman (1931), 1, cited as “Desmond MacCarthy. (Rearranged by A.E.)”. The Anne Ellis variant is used as an epigraph attributed to Desmond MacCarthy, in Hans Cloos, 'Ship’s Wake', Conversation With the Earth. The variant also appears quoted in a conversation between characters in Chap. 31, Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune: Dune Chronicles #4 (1981).
The centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said, 'Pray which leg goes after which?'
That work'd her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run.
Said, 'Pray which leg goes after which?'
That work'd her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run.
Pinafore Poems in Cassell's Weekly (1871). In Steven Vogel and Rosemary Anne Calvert Life's Devices (1988), 254.
The different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
From Alice in Wonderland. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland And, Through the Looking Glass (1898), 79.
To choose art means to turn one's back on the world, or at least on certain of its distractions.
In Christian Science Monitor (10 Apr 1985). Cited in Michael C. Thomsett and Linda Rose Thomsett, A Speaker's Treasury of Quotations: Maxims, Witticisms and Quips for Speeches and Presentations (2009), 13.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
