Preoccupation Quotes - Page 3

• ...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.

  David Foster Wallace

  Believe, Eras, Bigs

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• If you begin with the assumption of freedom, the preoccupation is always how to keep freedom in check, how to bind; But if you begin with the assumption of bondage, the preoccupation is always how to set out the word that frees.

  Gerhard

  Assumption, Bondage, Checks

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• Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.

  Jonathan Ive

  Jobs, Irrelevance, Apples

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• 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

  Ideas, People, Quests

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• Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.

  Tom Stoppard

  Running, Mean, Noses

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• We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to.

  Thomas Merton

  Gratitude, Giving, Laughing

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.147, Shambhala Publications

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

  Jean Renoir

  Understanding, Way, Millions

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• There is a silence that matches our best possibilities when we have learned to listen to others. We can master the art of being quiet in order to be able to hear clearly what others are saying. . . . We need to cut off the garbled static of our own preoccupations to give to people who want our quiet attention.

  Eugene Kennedy

  Art, Cutting, Order

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• To wait for hours to buy a train ticket or to see a doctor is accepted as a normal way of doing things. Privacy is not a great preoccupation, and this is a very crowded country.

  Nancy Travis

  Country, Doctors, Waiting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.

  James D. Watson

  Thinking, Break Through, Exciting

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• If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.

  Sherry Turkle

  Self, Mind, Fascination

  Sherry Turkle (2005). “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit”, p.29, MIT Press

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• Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

  Paul Brunton

  Spiritual, Men, Faults

  Paul Brunton (1986). “The Notebooks of Paul Brunton: Practices for the Quest; Relax and Retreat”, Larson Publication

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• Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.

  Adam Phillips

  Blind Spots, Limits, Recognition

  Adam Phillips (2005). “Going sane”, Egully.com

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• She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Beautiful, Kissing, Long

  Lawrence Durrell (1957). “Justine: By Lawrence Durrell”

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• A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

  S. S. Van Dine

  Character, Successful, Issues

  S. S. Van Dine (2015). “Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories”, p.6, Booklassic

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• So go marry someone, provided you're equally yoked and you actually like being with each other. Go get a job, provided it's not wicked. Go live somewhere in something with somebody or nobody. But put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God's sake start making some decisions in your life. Don't wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God's will, so just go out and do something.

  Kevin DeYoung

  Jobs, Decision, Waiting

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• A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.

  H. G. Wells

  Religious, Men, People

  H. G. Wells (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)”, p.10332, Delphi Classics

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• Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication in the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.

  Eric Hoffer

  Religious, Hate, Animal

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

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• Politics deserves much praise. Politics is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

  Bernard Crick

  Men, Political, Politics

  "In Defence of Politics".

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• The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

  Steven Pressfield

  Doe, Mystery, Shut Up

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.78, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• Beware of Destination Addiction... a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job and with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are.

  Robert Holden

  Happiness, Wise, Wisdom

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• 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

  Fun, Moving, Home

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• The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Simple, Men, Expression

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton (Part I: On the Creature Called Man, Chapter VII: The War of the Gods and Demons), 1925.

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• It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.

  Aleister Crowley

  Crush, Country, Sex

  Aleister Crowley (2015). “Moonchild”, p.213, Booklassic

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• Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

  Marcus Buckingham

  Leader, Clarity, Clear

  Twitter post from Aug 12, 2014

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