Quotes About Preoccupations

Yes, but there are so many young girls." "You're everything they're not. Kind, intelligent, witty…" "Nonsense. Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you're twenty.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers 'powers over us should be limited—these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvelous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.

We simply forget all this—so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations—and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes "old" again—petty, dark and ultimately meaningless—a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our "enjoying life" it comes to us: horrible, inescapable, senseless.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves. As the central preoccupations of an era make their way into the legal system, the Supreme Court eventually weighs in, and nine lawyers in robes become oracles of our national identity.

Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.

Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

Magicians scorned talking to animals; animal thoughts weren't nearly orderly enough to suit magicians, and were always full of large untidy preoccupations, like sex and death and the next meal.

Sex is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias – who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom, being one of humanity's main preoccupations.

Joel did not quite believe in picture actresses' grief. They have other preoccupations—they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them.

The entire thrust of this season at the end of the church year is designed to bring us face-to-face with reality—reality about sin and death, reality about the human race, reality about God. Something ultimate has entered our world, something or Someone that calls us to attention, calls us out of our daily preoccupations and our routine points of view. That is what this season with its special biblical readings is designed to reveal

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

The desire to grow rich at all costs, the taste for business, the passion for gain, the pursuit of comfort and material enjoyment are thus the most common preoccupations in despotisms.

Kay and Beverly were a disappointment to me. They worked hard at Modern Languages, but their conversation and preoccupations seemed hardly different from those of girls who might work in banks or offices.

There were only worries. She could think of nothing else.

He had himself a certain sympathy for Morel; unfortunately, the man had not understood that the world of today was no longer capable of concerning itself with elephants. People had other preoccupations. They were no longer interested in anything except their own skins.

This book was written in service to my obsessions. But it is also a story about other people's obsessions

one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture form, and where it all begins.

In order for love to exist, there has to be an affinity of thoughts, affinity of feelings, identical preoccupations.