Quotes About Preoccupation

The modern preoccupation with factuality has had a pervasive and distorting effect on how we see the Bible and Christianity.

Christianity in the modern period became preoccupied with the dynamic of believing or not believing. For many people, believing "iffy" claims to be true became the central meaning of Christian faith. It is an odd notion—as if what God most wants from us is believing highly problematic statements to be factually true. And if one can't believe them, then one doesn't have faith and isn't a Christian

Each guest had retired, as an animal retires with a bone to the back of its cage, to chew over some single obsession.

A dreadful suspicion was coming over me. Hadn't my mortal life been nothing but abysmal struggle and trivia and fear? Wasn't that the way it was for most mortals? Wasn't that the message of a score of modern writers and poets - that we wasted our lives in foolish preoccupation? Wasn't this all a miserable cliche?

The big problem with power, of course, is obsession. Once you get some of it and feel it, it dominates your whole life and it's all you can think about. That doesn't have to happen.

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.

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.

'Obsession' has a bad rap.

I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.

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.'

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.

There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.

I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

It was [Hugh's] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary.

Go back to the school in which you will make progress in being a Christian. Study your lessons, settle the issue of ambition, make Christ your preoccupation-and you will learn to enjoy the privileges of being truly content.

Life is nothing if you're not obsessed.

Recipe for a Worry Take one pound morbid preoccupation and mix vigorously with one cup overactive imagination. In a separate bowl, add one part hypersensitivity to three parts increased hormone activity. Fold together and let stew for hours on end.

In the first place, history is not concerned to express beauty. I do not deny that a great historian, in narrating some heroic incident, may rival the epic and the saga. He may tell a tale which would be fascinating even if it were false. But such cases are exceptional, and ought to be exceptional. Directly it appears that the governing preoccupation of an historian is to be picturesque, his narrative becomes intolerable.

No day passed that did not present an opportunity to become obsessed with a new area of concern.

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

I lose things. I am preoccupied. I am misty. Eyeglasses? I go through eyeglasses like tissue.

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

His face gets between me and my sleep.