Preoccupation Quotes

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.

Our preoccupation has always been to craft space in such a way as to induce social interactions that would in turn generate a sense of community and a culture, but starting from the very immediate issue of how action influences perception.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists… in the loved one, perfection.

I approach the world as a whole by taking an integrative approach, not a world of parts, and I like to bring different fields and disciplines together. The same is true with my preoccupation with cultural expression.

For most of the countries I visit, getting affordable energy in the hands of the people is a preoccupation.

A preoccupation with money and, especially, with what money meant was, in our family, an inherited thing. My father’s father, Jack, who died before I was born, was very much possessed by the idea that money was freedom.

When the soul is understood and attended to, we can be liberated from hurry, preoccupation, unsatisfied desires, and chronic discontent.

I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not be an endless preoccupation. You must dwell also on the glad remembrance of God’s loving-kindness; otherwise, sadness will harden the heart and lead it more deeply into despair.

The American preoccupation with the law, which is certainly not past, was at its zenith in 1995. The 1980s, the late 1980s, had sort of begun to percolate up to public consciousness this enormous interest in the law.

I felt sidelined by the industry, by the preoccupation with finding something newer, younger.

The definition of ‘morbid’ is an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Unfortunately, there’s no word to mean the perfectly healthy preoccupation with death, which is what I have.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

Madonna is that forbidden thing, the Nietzschean creative woman. Her preoccupation with a high level of work doesn’t allow her to follow the usual script that powerful women are expected to follow – ‘don’t hate me for my success, don’t hate me for my power.’

In its first 30 years of existence, up to the mid 1970s, the practical applications of game theory were very limited, probably as a result of excessive preoccupation by game theorists with cooperative solution concepts.

Setting up a community and seeing what happens to it when the megalomaniacs get busy: that’s my main preoccupation.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world’s first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution – the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers – not always in an acceptable form.

There’s such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story ‘The Lady With the Little Dog.’

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

But blacks make little to no progress and, worse, the preoccupation with injustice only leaves them eternally inconsolable and cut off from their own best energies and talents.

The fact that the Meghan and Harry interview was aired while Philip was in hospital did not trouble him. What did worry him was the couple’s preoccupation with their own problems and their willingness to talk about them in public.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

I knew a bit about the capabilities of HTML5 and have always had a preoccupation with technology. I wanted to delve deeper, to see what else it could do. The technology becomes the palette that you make the artwork with, your palette and your paint.

‘The Luminaries’ is such a different book to ‘The Rehearsal.’ There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there’s a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there’s patterning.

Much of today’s public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.

Today’s preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science – to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.

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.

It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer – all that preoccupation and brooding.

Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations – perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.

The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.

It had always been a British preoccupation to hold this mile record.

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

There’s a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

A preoccupation with job title is an immediate giveaway that someone’s priorities are not in line with the company’s.

I do think there’s a preoccupation that women understandably have with this idea of the roles we’re meant to play and whether or not those roles serve us or ultimately kind of imprison us.

I think there’s a preoccupation with the American market to make excuses and justify its past. If it isn’t current, it means somebody has to make an excuse for it. If it’s ‘cult,’ it gives it a sense of illegitimate legitimacy.

I’m not one of those people for which politics is my sole preoccupation.