208 Quotes About Escapism

If we were all minimalists instead of conspicuous consumers, there would be less demand on the world’s resources and we’d have a smaller, less berserk economy. We’d be less likely to harm the only planet we’ll ever have, and the super-rich would have fewer ways to exploit us.

Don’t judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do.

Escape is the avoidance of feelings through diversion. This avoidance is the backbone of the entertainment and liquor industries, and also the route of the workaholic. Escapism and avoidance of inner awareness is a socially condoned mechanism. We can avoid our own inner selves and keep our feelings from emerging by an endless variety of pursuits, many of which eventually become addictions as our dependency upon them grows. People are desperate to stay unconscious.

A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.

Когда люди живут в таких обстоятельствах, когда происходят ужасные вещи на их глазах, многие закрывают глаза и не хотят ничего знать, видеть. Потому что знать, видеть и понимать — это очень опасно. Многие рассуждали так: если я буду это знать, об этом думать, я начну об этом говорить. Тогда со мной самим что-то случится, я никому ничем не помогу, поэтому я не буду знать и не буду думать, пока меня это не коснулось. И сейчас так тоже многие думают.

All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we’re a lawyer, an artist or a police officer.

Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history?

Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are Escape Routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.

it is sufficient to say, that a chorus of work, the whole of my past life - but, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of it's incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings.