Absorbing Quotes - Page 5

• Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

  Nick Hornby

  Girl, Real, Hard Times

  "A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, May 7, 2005.

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• The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Support, Suffering, Church

  Encyclical Letter "Deus Caritas Est" of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI, w2.vatican.va. December 25, 2005.

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• Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

  Edna Ferber

  Writing, Climbing, Interesting

  Edna Ferber (1939). “A Peculiar Treasure”

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• The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

  Thomas Mann

  Beautiful, Confusing, Accessories

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• I've always been afraid of video games - not afraid that I wouldn't like them, but that I would like them too much, and that after mere seconds in front of any particularly bright and absorbing game, I would abandon all ambition, turn into a mouth-breathing zombie, and develop a wide, sofa-shaped rear end.

  Susan Orlean

  Ambition, Breathing, Games

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• The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.

  Garry Kasparov

  Success, Hard Work, Focus

  "Garry Kasparov On 'Chess Metaphors': The Chess Master And The Computer". Garry Kasparov's review of Diego Rasskin-Gutman's book "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind" (2005), www.huffingtonpost.com. March 24, 2010.

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• The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

  H. G. Wells

  Passion, Artist, Men

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• Every actor and actress is possessed of the absorbing passion to create something distinctive and unique.

  Hattie McDaniel

  Passion, Unique, Actors

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• Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

  Graham Nash

  Writing, Everything Happens For A Reason, Action

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• If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act,-he will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine.

  Henry Thomas Buckle

  Religious, Believe, Ignorance

  Henry Thomas Buckle (1865). “History of Civilization in England: In Five Volumes”, p.170

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• You are well equipped with an incredible potential for absorbing knowledge.  Let your imagination, the key to learning and memory, unleash that brain power and propel you along at ever-increasing speeds. It’s not an exclusive path with access granted only to those with a special gift for learning. It is, instead, available to everyone who has a brain. Anything’s possible.

  Dominic O'Brien

  Memories, Keys, Imagination

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• I don't think you can become an outstanding runner unless you get a certain amount of enjoyment out of the suffering. You have to enjoy absorbing it, controlling it, and - ultimately - overcoming it.

  Derek Clayton

  Thinking, Suffering, Overcoming

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• Clever, witty and absorbing, Amortality is a much-needed anatomy of our profound malaise about ageing. Its charms will never fade.

  David Baddiel

  Witty, Clever, Profound

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• Intuition is just the sum of all your experience. The way I see it, everything you’ve experienced, everything you know, you think you know and didn’t know you knew is there in your subconscious lying dormant, as it were. As a rule you don’t notice the sleeping creature, it’s just there, snoring and absorbing new things, right. But now and then it blinks, stretches and tells you, hey, I’ve seen this picture before. And tells you where in the picture things belong.

  Jo Nesbo

  Lying, Sleep, Thinking

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• I probably would have no capability of absorbing a 60-defeat season as a coach. It would be a foreign experience. My whole career, even as a player, has been on winning basketball clubs and it just seems to have been a part of the make-up of what’s been given me. That’s what I’ve been given and that’s what I’ve had to deal with. Some people can make fun of it or some people can have a good time with it, or some people can resent it. It’s just what it is.

  Phil Jackson

  Basketball, Fun, Winning

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• In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the comprehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights.

  Peter Sloterdijk

  Philosophy, Passion, Play

  Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.24, John Wiley & Sons

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• Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

  Gerda Lerner

  Struggle, Past, Men

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• Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.

  William J. Brennan

  Sex, Age, Mysterious

  "Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476". Writing for the court, 1957.

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• I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food.

  Maria Popova

  Fall, Home, Bad Day

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• What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story. [...] This is early days in the festival, but Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.

  Peter Bradshaw

  Real, Awards, Odds

  "Cannes 2012: Rust and Bone – review". www.theguardian.com. May 17, 2012.

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• Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths;
  Love laps his wings on either side the heart
  Absorbing all the incense of sweet thoughts,
  So that they pass not to the shrine of sound.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Sweet, Heart, Deep Love

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• In the art of teaching, we recognize that ideas and insights need to cook over a period of time.
  Sometimes the student who is least articulate about expressing the ideas is in fact the one who is absorbing
  and processing them most deeply. This applies as well to our own private learning of our art form; the
  areas in which we feel most stuck and most incompetent may be our richest gold mine of developing
  material. The use of silence in teaching then becomes very powerful.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Powerful, Teaching

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• I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Stars, Thinking, Years

  "One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality". Interview with Gregory Barber, www.motherjones.com. October 25, 2015.

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• The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

  Al Gore

  Long, Political, Age

  Saving the Constitution Speech at Constitution Hall, delivered 16 January 2006, Washington, D.C.

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• Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: 'tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it is begun.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Powerful, Spring, Passion

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.419

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