Top 100 Quotes About Self Absorption
#1. Could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years.
Jon Krakauer
#3. Self absorption is anti-seductive; it is a sign of insecurity.
Robert Greene
#4. Particularly with middle-class people, self-absorption is a struggle.
Ben Lewin
#5. At times ... one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.
Gail Godwin
#6. Can you, in a million years, imagine another female senator - Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Claire McCaskill - reacting to being called 'ma'am' like Barbara Boxer did? This is the kind of sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left that makes my teeth itch.
Mark Davis
#7. Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.
Siri Hustvedt
#8. Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.
Mason Cooley
#9. Serving others breaks you free from the shackles of self and self-absorption that choke out the joy of living.
James Hunter
#10. Love created this world, & the lack of it can kill it. Selfishness, self-absorption , arrogance & indifference never built anything.
John Hope Bryant
#11. I admire self-awareness more than probably any other quality, and I think in terms of what qualities are "good" in a person, it's a mostly subjective opinion, so I can't see a reason to think that self-absorption is inherently a bad thing.
Marie Calloway
#12. When evangelizers rise from prayer, their hearts are more open; freed of self-absorption, they are desirous of doing good and sharing their lives with others.
Pope Francis
#13. Why hope to live a long life if we're only going to fill it with self-absorption, body maintenance and image repair? When we die, do we want people to exclaim 'She looked ten years younger,' or do we want them to say 'She lived a great life'?
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#14. But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.
Dennis Lehane
#15. In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.
Jay Dratler
#16. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
Janet Malcolm
#17. Conscience is the moralized form of self-absorption.
Mason Cooley
#18. Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.
Rita Mae Brown
#19. The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency ... God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.
Brennan Manning
#20. Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.
Mason Cooley
#21. Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
Walter Benjamin
#22. The stories that I want to tell are completely, well, somewhat autobiographical. It's completely based on my own self-absorption issues and problems.
Nicole Holofcener
#23. Suffering reminds us of our brokenness, our humanity. It disarms us of our self-absorption and magnifies our need for one another.
Marquita Burke-DeJesus
#24. Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.
Paul Reiser
#25. Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection).
Elizabeth Gilbert
#26. One of the greatest theological challenges of our time is to move our worship beyond self-absorption.
Kelly M. Kapic
#27. Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, which is most greatly experienced in the heart of those willing to surrender all self-sufficiency: self-promotion, self-reliance, self-protection, and self-absorption: it is a gift given.
Robin M. Bertram
#28. There's nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption .
Timothy Keller
#29. Selfishness and self-absorption are deadly charm-exterminators.
Loretta Young
#30. Selfishness is self-absorption, self-seeking behaviour that either disregards the rights and needs of others or tramples them deliberately in favour of personal gain.
Adelyn Birch
#31. What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression ...
Wendy Kaminer
#32. Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .
Timothy Keller
#33. When we don't put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.
Zeena Schreck
#34. I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression.
Steve Toltz
#35. It's about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption - and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.
Meghan Daum
#36. I'd like to say I'm not self-absorbed compared to others, but that's hard to say since I'm far too self-absorbed to pry into others' self-absorption.
Anonymous
#37. To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
Tom Stoppard
#38. Happiness lies outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one's goal, not self-absorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of an irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good.
Valerie Solanas
#39. To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.
Richard Hofstadter
#40. Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment.
Mason Cooley
#41. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.
Nick Hornby
#42. Hopelessness sets in, when a man is bound up in his shame
living small, within that closed horizon of fantasy and self-absorption.
Andrew Comiskey
#43. There is a certain manner of self-absorption in speaking that always renders the speaker disagreeable. For it is as great a folly to listen only to ourselves while we are carrying on a conversation with others as it is to talk to ourselves while we are alone.
Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...
#44. I heard her surprise and then the sigh as we began the rhythm of connection and self-absorption, the miracle of sex.
Delia Ephron
#45. Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.
Edith Wharton
#46. They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.
Ann Brashares
#47. Love draws you out of your cocoon of self-absorption to attune to others. Love allows you to really see another person, holistically, with care, concern, and compassion.
Barbara L. Fredrickson
#48. Acting requires absorption, but not self-absorption and, in the actor's mind, the question must always be 'Why am I doing this?,' not 'How am I doing it?
Maureen Lipman
#49. He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#50. When the healthy pursuit of self-interest and self-realizatio n turns into self-absorption , other people can lose their intrinsic value in our eyes and become mere means to the fulfillment of our needs and desires.
P. M. Forni
#51. My self-absorption warms me; yours boils me.
Mason Cooley
#52. Your dissatisfaction with yourself speaks of a self-absorption, a vanity, which always gets in the way of your truly coming to rejoice in life.
Matias Dalsgaard
#53. During adolescence imagination is boundless. The urge toward self-perfection is at its peak. And with all their self- absorption and personalized dreams of glory, youth are in pursuit of something larger than personal passions, some values or ideals to which they might attach their imaginations.
Louise J. Kaplan
#54. Anything that inspires addiction or obsession - substances, entertainment, beauty, secrecy - is dangerous in that it can lead to isolation, self-absorption, and disconnection, to paralyzed stasis: an immobility that gathers like a force.
Greg Carlisle
#55. I am not the center of the universe. And it's a lesson that I keep having to learn; it's my ongoing work, I'd say. And being in a career that is predicated on a degree of self-absorption, that is a tricky thing to negotiate sometimes.
Patrick Fabian
#56. I wasn't involved in anything. I wasn't out - you know, I know I wasn't in ACT UP. I wasn't with Larry Kramer. I wasn't by his side. I wasn't saying what I should do, because, by all accounts, I was a drug addict and an alcoholic. And I was living in a complete bubble of self-absorption.
Elton John
#57. Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow. Awareness of others is a healthy antidote to this self-focus.
Kevin Malarkey
#58. Consider suffering's simultaneous self-absorption and incitement to empathy. The former refigures the the self by reducing you to symptoms, conditions, enduring. The latter refigures the self by expanding it.
Zach Savich
#59. David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.
David Bowie
#60. Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd
Mark Rippetoe
#61. Anna liked magazines. They were glossy machines. The only technology that she could fold. She read them on a regular basis because they were absorbing. Each one came out on a specific day of the week and was good for an hour of absorption.
Sarah Schulman
#62. When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
Rollo May
#63. Samadhi is perfect absorption to the point where there is no sense of being absorbed, not the consciousness of knowing that you are having an experience.
Frederick Lenz
#64. We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Marvin Minsky
#65. There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.
Richard M. Weaver
#66. An inability to encourage someone else is usually rooted in an absorption
with self that is blind to the needs or gifts of others, or a pride that cannot bring itself to praise God's grace in them.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#67. Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
Jacques Barzun
#68. In fact, studies show that vegans tend to get more iron than meat eaters. Vitamin C from fruits and vegetables increases iron absorption. Meanwhile, dairy products reduce iron absorption significantly.
Sharon Gannon
#69. The ecstasy and completion of absorption in God is so fantastic that you can't possibly have lost anything because all the things you've always loved and always experienced came forth from there and exist there and are always there.
Frederick Lenz
#71. It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
Edna O'Brien
#72. These questions can only be answered in absorption, because there are no answers.
Frederick Lenz
#73. I wonder at times if we're not all blind. It just seems there are an abundance of books unread, paint strokes not admired, and performances unattended. So much attention painstakingly sought and not given.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#74. Time assumes another dimension now - work and absorption in the search for an answer.
Daniel Keyes
#75. If happiness comes at all: which is by no means prearranged; it comes by the way, while you are seeking for something else. Something outside yourself, beyond yourself: in a brief absorption of self-forgetfulness.
Caitlin Thomas
#76. The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.
Jean Baudrillard
#77. It is more important to repeat a mantra several times with total absorption than to parrot it for hours on end.
Frederick Lenz
#78. In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas- and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.
Werner Heisenberg
#79. Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.
Mark Helprin
#80. Samadhi is the absorption of God. There's no sense of time, place or condition.
Frederick Lenz
#81. Absorption in things other than self is the secret of a happy life.
James Cagney
#82. However tiresome to others, the most indefatigable orator is never tedious to himself. The sound of his own voice never loses its harmony to his own ear; and among the delusions, which self-love is ever assiduous in attempting to pass upon virtue, he fancies himself to be sounding the sweetest tones
John Quincy Adams
#83. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.
Alain De Botton
#84. You Russians like to think you're poets but perhaps you're just touchy.
Jack Ryan
#85. What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence - a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.
Michael Pollan
#86. Indeed, there is much in pure humanitarian culture, as opposed to rigid scientific training, which encourages absorption in the affairs of mankind, and more or less indifference to the unfathomed abysses of star-strown space that yawn interminably about this terrestrial grain of dust.
H.P. Lovecraft
#87. When you meditate with an enlightened teacher, you will feel something from them. They just dissolve completely, absorption in nirvana, where they don't even have physical contact with this world anymore.
Frederick Lenz
#88. Happiness lies in the absorption in some vocation which satisfies the soul.
William Osler
#89. As each individual is electrically alive and dynamic, so yoga is a living, dynamic force in life. In order to savor its essence, one needs a religiously attentive dynamic practice done with awareness and absorption.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#90. But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.
Maria Konnikova
#91. Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work. Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighbourhood can stand for everything.
Stephen King
#92. Each element has a characteristic atomic spectrum, due to the absorption and emission of light associated with the unique energy levels of its orbiting electrons.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
#93. But the work had told upon the Editor. Work of that sort carries its penalties with it. Success means absorption, and absorption spells softening of the brain.
P.G. Wodehouse
#94. it looks like a small envelope with a phenomenal capacity for water absorption.
Fredrik Backman
#95. Once you have mastered the ten thousand states of mind, it's paranirvana, the absorption into the stillness forever.
Frederick Lenz
#96. The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.
John Dewey
#97. When your body absorbs toxins, it stores them in fat, which is why fiber and probiotics are strategic weapons for weight loss. Fiber keeps your colon healthy and reduces your body's absorption of toxins.
Suzanne Somers
#98. The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Walter Lippmann
#100. To see color as form means looking at the image in a new way, trying to free oneself from absorption in subject matter.
Cole Weston
