Quotes About Preoccupations

#1. Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupations of free men, and its existences is a test of freedom.

Bernard Crick

#2. By sharing something, I realized that I'm not alone, that there are a lot of people that share with me the same preoccupations, the same ideas, the same ideals, and the same quest for a meaning for this life.

Paulo Coelho

#3. I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

Rebecca Solnit

#4. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.

Seneca.

#5. [Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Ernest Becker

#6. The preoccupations of young women-their looks, their clothes, their social life-don't seem to change much from generation to generation. But in every generation there are a few that make others choices.

Elisabeth Elliot

#7. I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else's county, where the climate is different, the food is different, the light is different, where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don't seem to apply and it is even fun to go shopping.

Jan Morris

#8. Thus worshiping, serving, studying, praying, each in its own way squeezes selfishness out of us; pushes aside our preoccupations with the things of the world.

Neal A. Maxwell

#9. Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversation of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility.

Zoe Heller

#10. When, upon the closed system of normal preoccupations, a story of a sea serpent appears, it is inhospitably treated. To us of the wider cordialities, it has recommendations for kinder reception. I think that we shall be noted in recognitions of good works for our bizarre charities.

Charles Fort

#11. We talked, and I ate, and for the first time, Katy's death moved to the back of my consciousness, if only for a moment. This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations. As

Drew Magary

#12. During the course of many years I have observed that a great number of doctors, lawyers, and important businessmen make a habit of visiting a chess club during the late afternoon or evening to relax and find relief from the preoccupations of their work.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#13. The first story I wrote was "Catface" which was later selected for The O. Henry Collection, so that gave me some confidence to try some more. Gathering these stories together was fun, but I realized when I read them that I have certain mental preoccupations and they keep recurring in my stories.

Arthur Bradford

#14. I'm simply saying that our deepest thoughts, desires and preoccupations manifest themselves in art, whether we intend them to or not. That's what art is for; it's not cerebral, it's emotional.

Simon Pegg

#15. In order for love to exist, there has to be an affinity of thoughts, affinity of feelings, identical preoccupations.

Samael Aun Weor

#16. I only object when any one particular group...gets a stranglehold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn't conform to its own standards....The ax falls, ecumenically, on the head of anybody...who doesn't share this group's parochial preoccupations.

Truman Capote

#17. One of my basic feelings is that the mind, and the heart alike, of the photographer must be dedicated to the glory, the magic, and the mystery of light. The mystery of time, the magic of light, the enigma of reality - and their interrelationships - are my constant themes and preoccupations.

Clarence John Laughlin

#18. Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.

Sogyal Rinpoche

#19. Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Ralph Ellison

#20. Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Renata Adler

#21. I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvas for reinvention, I think.

Morag Joss

#22. Over time, parents have barnacled the most routine activities in infancy with their own preoccupations. It's sometimes hard to see the baby for all the barnacles.

Nicholas Day

#23. Walk away from your own preoccupations ... and see the perishing multitudes.

K.P. Yohannan

#24. Crusoe's religious preoccupations seemed boring and rather silly.

George R. Stewart

#25. Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.

Stephen R. Prothero

#26. In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.

Marcus Buckingham

#27. I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.

Orson Welles

#28. Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and
thoughtless is far more fascinating when you're twenty.

Ray Bradbury

#29. I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

Andrew Motion

#30. I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

Richard Dawkins

#31. The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

Freda Adler

#32. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the text.

Louise Rosenblatt

#33. It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations
past and present
are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.

Eric Hoffer

#34. I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.

George Saunders

#35. Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves. As the central preoccupations of an era make their way into the legal system, the Supreme Court eventually weighs in, and nine lawyers in robes become oracles of our national identity.

Noah Feldman

#36. Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

Pankaj Mishra

#37. You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

Joseph O'Neill

#38. As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images ... We pass judgement on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#39. Even a small, everyday lie is a clue to the personality and preoccupations of the liar, like a dream or any other confection of the mind, that is half-conscious and half-unconscious, as all creative acts must be.

Helen McCloy

#40. Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.

Timothy Ferriss

#41. I found growing up that love and sexuality was a wonderful way to understand existence. When we love it takes us beyond ourselves, otherwise we're just absorbed with the preoccupations that we invent.

Frederick Lenz

#42. He smelled the smells of commerce and listened to the cursing of the sailors, both of which he admired: the former, as it reeked of wealth, and the latter because it combined his two other chief preoccupations, these being theology and anatomy.

Roger Zelazny

#43. Passing thoughts can sometimes indicate unconscious preoccupations that may need to be examined.

Henry Cloud

#44. One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

Paulo Freire

#45. There will always be causes for anxiety, whether due to prosperity or to wretchedness. Life will be driven on through a succession of preoccupations: we shall always long for leisure, but never enjoy it.

Seneca.

#46. Europe has to address people's needs directly and reflect their priorities, not our own preoccupations.

Peter Mandelson

#47. I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.

Alfred North Whitehead

#48. The trivial preoccupations of daily life are not enough for man; wisdom too is a native hunger.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#49. We live and work in a world that carries preoccupations about money, but what does the soul care about such things?

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

#50. I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.

Ayad Akhtar

#51. The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls
their looks, their clothes, their social life
do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few.

Elisabeth Elliot

#52. He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Boris Pasternak

#53. Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations.

Jean Renoir

#54. In a way, fasting is like the "calming of the monkey mind" effected by the rosary prayer: both are means of stilling the effervescence of relatively superficial preoccupations.

Robert Barron

#55. Yale University is famous for its Sex Week. It does not have a Dignity of the Worker Week or even a Save the Planet Week. This self-involved focus speaks volumes about the preoccupations of today's ruling class.

R. R. Reno

#56. To discover the meaning of what is called "social justice" has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#57. We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world ... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.

Mark Rothko

#58. Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

Lawrence Durrell

#59. Sometimes when everything has totally apart, the meaningless preoccupations that so often dominate our lives simply fall away. And what is left is who we really are, and who we really are is compassionate and intelligent and wise.

Marianne Williamson

#60. This is my child, this is my wealth: such thoughts are the preoccupations of fools. If we are unable to own even ourselves, why make such claims?

Gautama Buddha

#61. There's something about my films; they're informed by my sensibility. I have the same preoccupations, the same interests ... there's just something in the nuance, and so you always know it's a film of mine whether I sign my name to it or not.

Woody Allen

#62. (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate);

George Eliot

#63. Dublin was hardly worried by the war; her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties; their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever.

Louis MacNeice

#64. Preservation of the past has been one of humankind's chief preoccupations for centuries, although I am not convinced much of it is worth preserving.

Chris Flynn

#65. When you have succeeded in letting go of a trivial preoccupation or two, your awareness will begin to expand into the deeper sources of stress in your life, the bigger uncontrollable things that you have been at pains to control.

Linda Bender