Obsession Quotes - Page 5

• My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.

  Christian Bale

  Character, Differences, People

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• Dancing is my obsession. My life.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Dancing

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• I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

  Antonin Artaud

  Suicide, Time, Morning

  "Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society". Essay by Antonin Artaud, 1947.

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• An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions.

  Andres Serrano

  Art, Artist

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• Just as our taste in lovers is far more revealing than our choice of friends, the object of an artist's obsession can open up doors to their soul that might otherwise remain shut tight.

  Vince Aletti

  Artist, Doors, Choices

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• Be careful what you choose to do consciously, for unless your will is very strong, that is what you may have to do repeatedly and compulsively through the habit-influencing power of the subconscious mind.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Strong, Mind, May

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• If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.

  Elie Wiesel

  Memories, Writing, Hatred

  Elie Wiesel (2011). “From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences”, p.8, Schocken

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• Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all.

  Octavia Butler

  Doubt, Able, Dangerous

  Octavia E. Butler (2011). “Bloodchild and Other Stories”, p.138, Seven Stories Press

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• I do not think that obsession is funny or that not being able to stop one's intensity is funny.

  Jim Dine

  Thinking, Dine In, Able

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• love is like Someone is camping in your head

  Helen Fisher

  Love Is, Camping, Love Is Like

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• I have, at times, been absorbed in my work to the point of complete self-oblivion. Once I worked for thirty-six hours without a break - to complete exhaustion; and while I was in the middle of it I didn't even notice.

  Alton Tobey

  Self, Six, Oblivion

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• I have to go on writing because I wouldn't be able to go on without writing. It is the only function that works for me, and without that function, I would die.

  Farley Mowat

  Writing, Goes On, Able

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• In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

  Alberto Giacometti

  Art, Quality, Impossible

  "Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets". Book by Joel Shatzky, ‎Michael Taub, p. 302, 1999.

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• The best painting comes out of compulsions and obsessions, out of deep love or hate, out of intellectual or emotional involvement with something that lies outside the painting itself.

  Edward Betts

  Hate, Lying, Deep Love

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• People don't paint for the hell of it. It's a deeply seated thing - a preoccupation - the whole of one's life.

  Roger de Grey

  People, Hell, Paint

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• As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

  James Elkins

  Oil, Doe, Stories

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• To obsess too virulently is to walk alone in anxiety. But to obsess too little is to wall oneself off from one's own creativity.

  Eric Maisel

  Wall, Creativity, Anxiety

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

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• What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

  Rowan Williams

  Marketing, Empires, Degrees

  "The new head of the Anglican church ... in his own words" by Stephen Bates, www.theguardian.com. July 25, 2002.

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• I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out.

  John Ruskin

  Sick, Giddy, Tempting

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• Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Lonely, Memories, Loneliness

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• We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

  Amy Tan

  People, Half, Firsts

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• I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I'd go crazy.

  Claude Monet

  Crazy, Thinking, Painting

  Claude Monet (2014). “Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters”, Chartwell

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• Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

  Jacques Lacan

  Mean, Doe, Traps

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• I like the idea of craziness with discipline.

  Karl Lagerfeld

  Hate, Ideas, Discipline

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• Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

  Aldous Huxley

  Animal, Atheism, Cows

  "Do What You Will". Book by Aldous Huxley, 1929.

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