Quotes About Obsessions

Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in 'War and Peace.' They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.

The raging desire to come to a final conclusion is one the most deadly and sterile obsessions that belong to humanity. Every religion and philosophy has made claims to its own God, to have touched the infinite, to have discovered the recipe for happiness. What pride and what emptiness! To the contrary, I see that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works don't come to final conclusions.

The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don't love you back.

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.

Donald Trump's mind is that tabloid you see at the checkout counter of the grocery store claiming that aliens impregnated Chelsea Clinton so the offspring could become president and turn the United States over to the Federation. Few Republicans challenge Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman's office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures.

'Hill St.' was very good, but it was very impersonal work for me. I wrote about that place as if I was a visitor. It wasn't what my life was like. It was a great place to learn the craft of how to shape a scene, but I wanted a chance to write about more personal themes and obsessions.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

Harris believes that people suffering from a whole range of disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thought—including addiction, obsessions, and eating disorders as well as depression—stand to benefit from "the ability of psychedelics to disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior by disintegrating the patterns of [neural] activity upon which they rest.

The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.

How often do we use other people as screens upon which to project our obsessions? Our discontents, dreams, desires, and fears? Well, I always thought, often enough that its a wonder the whole waking world isn't simply viewed as an endless improvised film. One with as many screenwriters, producers, and directors as there are actors

To be converted fully is to let God lead us out of our compulsions. It means that we admit how we give up ceaselessly trying to "fix" things. Freedom is the opposite of compulsive obsessions. This is not easy, of course, mostly because intense needs motivate us.

Artists' obsessions with technology are not new, but in the late aughts, the work tended to focus on the possibility of the medium, treating technology like a new tool rather than a sociopolitical framework.

How many artists to pick as my obsessions? The four I listen to all the time are Phoebe Bridgers, A Tribe Called Quest - I'm being very selective, here - and then probably the Cure, still; and then The Internet - I love The Internet.

A man's weakest spots are almost always closest to his passions.

The CIA's job was to tell presidents about dangerous surprises, it was that simple. This led Tenet quickly to the threat of terrorism, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. Through discussions at the White House he absorbed and then recapitulated Clinton's own emerging obsessions with terrorism and especially biological weapons.

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

I love flat shoes, more so than heels. One of my obsessions is men's co-respondent lace-ups.

The obsessions of others embarrass and repel because they seem to dehumanize, to make the obsessed one robotic and alien and unavailable.

Magic intensifies and concentrates passions, strengthening not only joy, but ruinous passions as well, and in this way they may become obsessions, and unbearable unless released. -Joseph Anders

What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us?

It is winter. Ravens are standing on a pile of bones -- black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean. It's what I do each time I sit down to write. What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us? 'To write,' Marguerite Duras remarked, 'is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

Television and the internet may offer anyone and everyone their fifteen minutes of fame; the passions and obsessions that drive human nature, however, remain the same same.

And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.