A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
I feel like it's a subversive thing [a certain body type to admire] which keeps women preoccupied with something that doesn't matter, and takes up a lot of space, and prevents people from what they're meant to be doing.
Perspective is a kind of mental sunblock that, provided we apply it properly, prevents us from getting burned by past mistakes.
Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.
The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.
. . . in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Love labour: for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayest for physique. It is wholesome for the body, and good for the mind. It prevents the fruits of idleness, which many times come of nothing to do, and leads many to do what is worse than nothing.
Money cannot buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable. Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.
Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
Fear doesn't prevent death, but it certainly prevents life.
We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge.
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Circumcision in the United States is routinely performed without anesthesia, though anesthesia reduces the infant's stress and prevents infection and blood clots.
When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change. The Roman philosopher Tacitus rightly observed that 'the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise. ' If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into aliveness, alertness and creativity.
The severity of the laws prevents their execution.
There is no worse material poverty, I am keen to stress, than the poverty which prevents people from earning their bread and deprives them of the dignity of work.
Identification prevents and perverts the flow of thought-feeling.
Tea tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.
Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.