Preoccupied Quotes & Sayings

Our interests are centered in ourselves. We are preoccupied with material things. Our supreme god is technology; our goddess is sex. Most of us are more interested in getting to the moon than in getting to heaven, more concerned about conquering space than about conquering ourselves. We are more dedicated to material security than to inner purity. We give much more thought to what we wear, what we eat, what we drink, and what we can do to relax than we give to what we are. This preoccupation with peripheral things applies to every area of our lives. — Billy Graham

I seem to walk in the world as two people. The normal everyday-me is as preoccupied, unobservant and oblivious to visual clues as I ever was. Then there is the photographer-me, the one who has a camera in hand and a specific project in mind, and then the world suddenly jumps to life with potential pictures, as if a switch had been thrown in my brain and a different person is looking out of the same eyes. — Bill Jay

Disciples who are steadfast and immovable do not become fanatics or extremists, are not overzealous, and are not preoccupied with misguided gospel hobbies. — David A. Bednar

I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments. — Patti Smith

Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we're forced to undergo the event twice - once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it. — H.E. Davey

Moments of pure happiness come upon you unexpectedly. Don't be too preoccupied to experience them. — Jessica Lange

In essence, what is forbidden to do is likewise forbidden as an object of reflection. Included in this is thinking about the weaknesses or faults of others, whether they are present or not. The Prophet said, "There is a tree in Paradise reserved for one
whose own faults preoccupied him from considering the faults of others." Spending time thinking or talking about other people's faults is foolish. Time is short and is better invested in recognizing one's own shortcomings and then working consistently to eradicate them. — Hamza Yusuf

Demelza thought: She's one day too late, just one day. How beautiful she is; how I hate her. Then she glanced at Ross again, and for the first time like the stab of a treacherous knife it occurred to her that Ross's desire for her last night was a flicker for empty passion. All day she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to spare time for his. Now she could see so much in his eyes. — Winston Graham

This is the average age of my Hunters, and all young maidens for whom I am patron, before they go astray."
"Go astray?"
"Grow up. Become smitten with boys. Become silly, preoccupied, insecure. — Rick Riordan

Yeah but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think if they should. — Jeff Goldblum

I started doing a Twitter feed when my father was dying. I was very distracted, preoccupied. It was upsetting. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

Literature encourages tolerance-bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities. — Northrop Frye

Self-admiration has created a culture of narcissism and a "love gap" that diminishes us. What the world needs most is a love that is the polar opposite of narcissism. A love that is selfless and self-abandoning. A love that does not ask, "What's in it for me?" but "What's in it for those I am privileged to know?" A love that isn't about being served but serving others. Your dreams come alive when you are preoccupied with making other people's dreams come true. That is where real happiness is found. — Mark Chironna

The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give to little ortoo much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child
well behaved and dutiful
of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me. — Alice Miller

Their eyes met at the same instant moment, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist, her eyes were grey, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression, as if half her mind were on whatever is was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, There felt sure the woman would come to her, Then, Then Therese saw her walk slowly towards the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer. — Patricia Highsmith

We must never get into the habit of being preoccupied with the future. There is no reason to do so. God is there. — Mother Teresa

I want to be oblivious to the hurt written on her face. I want to be selfish and young and normal. M would be that way. She would need space to grieve. She would rebel because her parents were simply uncool, not because one was wearing a horrifying happy mask and the other was a living ghost. She'd be distant because she was preoccupied with boys or school, not because she's tired from hunting down the Histories of the dead, or distracted by her new hotel-turned-apartment, where the walls are filled with crimes. — Victoria Schwab

I actually think if you have a strong junior class, that's the best possible scenario. In their senior year, guys who are on the threshold of making it to the NBA start getting preoccupied in their thoughts elsewhere more than concerning themselves with the present. The junior class is the perfect age. — Rick Pitino

When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life- mountain and forest lines, as it were- then a man's innermost will becomes agitated, preoccupied, and wistful. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause - to look at them and make something of them. — Harry Crews

America breeds ambition and while that can be a good thing, sometimes it's not. Ambition also breeds competition and that can be a very bad thing. People become chronically preoccupied with competing and don't know when to stop. It can become unhealthy. — Chaka Khan

I know I was an alcoholic because I was preoccupied whether alcohol was going to be served or not. — Betty Ford

The main reason we were close and worked in the way we did was that it was a collaboration that was based on more than just the traditional view of design," Ive says. "We both perceived objects in our environment, and people, and organizational structures intuitively in the same way. Beauty can be conceptual, it can be symbolic, it can stand as testament to progress and what humankind has managed to achieve in the last fifteen years. In that sense, it could represent progress, or it could be something as trivial as the machined face on a screw. That's why we got on well, 'cause we both thought that way. If my contribution was simply to the shapes of things, we wouldn't have spent so much time together. It makes no sense that the CEO of a company this size would spend nearly every lunchtime and big chunks of the afternoon with somebody who just was preoccupied with form. — Brent Schlender

Man is evolving ... but it's difficult to see his progress with a Western perception of time. The Hindus think of time in much larger segments. They watch the hour hand of the clock while we in the West are preoccupied with the second hand. — David Lynch

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me. — Tom Carter

Meditation is misunderstood as something you envision in your head, when in fact it is something to be seen with your own eyes. What you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred - the cave of rumination and memory, the cauldron of anxiety and fear - isn't where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes. The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are. — Karen Maezen Miller

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation. — Brian Ferneyhough

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

We can learn only in the expectation of life. Europe is too preoccupied with its destruction to concern itself with such things. A condemned man is interested only in himself, the passage of hours and such intimations of immortality as he can conjure from the recesses of his mind. — Eric Ambler

There's a fog of fae magic on the first floor of the house," he told her. "Where's Charles?" "Downstairs," she told him. "He sent me up here to make sure nothing happened to the kids." "There's a pool of blood just outside the door," he whispered, stepping aside so Anna could see it while the kids were preoccupied. "Chelsea's blood. I can't scent her through the stink of fae magic that is coating this house. — Patricia Briggs

Indeed, living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness. We realize that we are in the center, and that from there all that is and all that takes place can be seen and understood as part of the mystery of God's life with us. Our conflicts and pains, our tasks and promises, our families and friends, our activities and projects, our hopes and aspirations, no longer appear to us as a fatiguing variety of things which we can barely keep together, but rather as affirmations and revelations of the new life of the Spirit in us. "All these other things," which so occupied and preoccupied us, now come as gifts or challenges that strengthen and deepen the new life which we have discovered. This does not mean that the spiritual life makes things easier or takes our struggles and pains away. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science. — Yann Martel

Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost completely ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have fallen in its grip. — Kit Fine

There is a weird kind of anonymity a roller coaster provides: It's populated, but everyone's too preoccupied with whirling around the roof of a casino to eavesdrop. It runs a fixed amount of time, has minimal surveillance for lack of a way to descramble the audio, and it's conveniently out of earshot for certain writer- types who might scribble down the plan. — Daniel Younger

Observe your cat. It is difficult to surprise him. Why? Naturally his superior hearing is part of the answer, but not all of it. He moves well, using his senses fully. He is not preoccupied with irrelevancies. He's not thinking about his job or his image or his income tax. He is putting first things first, principally his physical security. Do likewise. — Jeff Cooper

Every time the phone rang, my heart jumped. Was it Alexander? And when it wasn't him my heart would break into a million pieces. It had been two longs days since I had seen my Gothic mate. I was so preoccupied with Alexander, dreaming of the next time we'd be together, nothing else mattered. I didn't wash the spot where his tender love lips had pressed against my flesh. I was acting like I was straight out of a Gidget movie! What had happened to me? I was losing my edge! For the first time in my life I was really afraid. Afraid of never seeing him again and afraid of being rejected. — Ellen Schreiber

We don't actually want our young people to encounter the mysteries of love anyway; best to keep them preoccupied with the tedium of lust instead. The — Anthony Esolen

We have very little, so we have nothing to be preoccupied with. The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are. — Mother Teresa

Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? — Seneca.

The same Holy Spirit mpowers believers today, but we tend to get preoccupied with healing bodies, making a name for ourselves, and mystical signs. We have ceased to be amazed at the miracle of a repentant sinner — Marci M. Preheim

The young of the town, preoccupied with their own germinating angst, which each possessed in varying degree (though few were ever fully aware of its existence), felt no particular connection to the land, its people, its structures, or its history. As such, they had no inclination to defend its invisible borders from declared enemies within or without. They desired only escape from this small village, which each viewed as an existential prison built upon the antiquated expectations of their parents and their parents' parents. And because of their invisible bondage, the young of this town were possessed by a quiet rage. But this rage laid torpid and inert within them, dulled to sleep by the tired repetition of nothing happening over and over and over again, day after day after day.
This is the story of one of those young people, and the terrible things that happened to her, and the terrible things she did as a result. — P.S. Baber

We judge one another by our outward actions, but in the motive underlying those actions our judgment may be widely at fault. Preoccupied by our own private interpretation of the matter, we can see only the one possible motive behind the action, so that our solution may be quite plausible, quite coherent, and quite wrong. - Dorothy L. Sayers, Introduction, Pg. 4 — The Detection Club

I try to not think too much about how stuff gets seen as it's being done by a woman. Because if you think about it, then you end up thinking about how you're acting, and if you are thinking about how you're acting, then you are preoccupied and you're going to end up being insincere. You're kind of not present. — Christine Quinn

Be so preoccupied with good will that you haven't room for ill will. — E. Stanley Jones

There is legitimate pleasure, which is not wrong, but we are not to become so preoccupied with its activities that it takes the place of God. — Billy Graham

Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of Purpose; everyone's got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn't mean it's and unfriendly place
just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I'm a social creature but there are times and places you just don't want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being. — Laura Anne Gilman

The fisherman has a harmless, preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant, that nothing fears. He blends himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream; he addresses himself to it as a lover to his mistress; he woos it and stays with it till he knows its hidden secrets. Where it deepens his purpose deepens; where it is shallow he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days. — John Burroughs

The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer. — Anton Chekhov

Being trampled almost to death by a preoccupied troll is almost the ideal cure for a person confused about what is real and what isn't. Reality is something walking heavily up your spine. — Terry Pratchett

Negligence in prayer withers the inner man. Nothing can be a substitute for it, not even Christian work. Many are so preoccupied with work that they allow little time for prayer. Hence they cannot cast out demons. Prayer enables us first inwardly to overcome the enemy and then outwardly to deal with him. — Watchman Nee

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work. — Robert Jay Lifton

He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist. — Tracy Kidder

I'm definitely preoccupied by thinking I'm just a biological thing. I want to feel that there's more, but so often I'm reminded of how we're just like baboons, basically. — Yannis Philippakis

To clothe the penguins is a very serious business. At present when a penguin desires a penguin he knows precisely what he desires and his lust is limited by an exact knowledge of its object. At this moment two or three couples of penguins are making love on the beach. See with what simplicity! No one pays any attention and the actors themselves do not seem to be greatly preoccupied. But when the female penguins are clothed, the male penguin will not form so exact a notion of what it is that attracts him to them. His indeterminate desires will fly out into all sorts of dreams and illusions; in short, father, he will know love and its mad torments. And all the time the female penguins will cast down their eyes and bite their lips, and take on airs as if they kept a treasure under their clothes! . . . what a pity! — Anatole France

Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality. — Richard Wright

THE TWINS WERE eighteen months old now, walking (and standing and staring and screaming and sitting) just like other children more or less their age, and Andy found herself increasingly preoccupied with those baby scrapbooks her brother's wife had sent when they were born. Andy had gotten Janny's to the six-month mark - the last photo was of her sitting up in the baby bath with her fingers in her mouth. Richie's and Michael's - not even birth pictures. Birth pictures of the twins existed, but they reminded Andy more of mug shots than of baby photos, naked in incubators, little skinny limbs and odd heads, no hair except where it shouldn't be, on arms and back, like monkeys. She had stuffed the scrapbooks onto the upper shelf in the closet in Richie and Michael's room, and every time she slid open that door, she would see their spines, white, pink, and blue, the silliest objects in her very modern house, ready to get thrown out. — Jane Smiley

And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world - man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying. — Maurice Blanchot

We are so blinkered by progress, so preoccupied with where we want to go and how fast we can travel, that many of us have lost the ability to simply 'stop'. — Fennel Hudson

The crime of capitalism is that it forces the vast majority of the population to remain preoccupied with basic concerns of nutrition, housing, health, and skill acquisition. It leaves little time for fostering the community and creativity that humans crave — Nivedita Majumdar

If I spend my life preoccupied with me and my own happiness, I will live life missing the deepest joy that God has for me. When — Matthew Kelly

It is impossible to study the works of the great mathematicians, or even those of the lesser, without noticing and distinguishing two opposite tendencies, or rather two entirely different kinds of minds. The one sort are above all preoccupied with logic; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The other sort are guided by intuition and at the first stroke make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like bold cavalrymen of the advance guard.
[1913, p210] — Henri Poincare

My goal is to make furniture that people can be comfortable living with. If you're not preoccupied with making an impact with your designs, chances are something that looks good today will look good tomorrow. — Sam Maloof

...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so. — Paul Edward Gottfried

Thinking about the weaknesses or faults of others is forbidden, whether they are present or not. The Prophet said, There is a tree in Paradise reserved for one whose own faults preoccupied him from considering the faults of others. — Hamza Yusuf

Rabindranath Tagore writes that the song he wanted to sing has never happened because he spent his days "stringing and unstringing" his instrument. Whenever I read these lines a certain sadness enters my soul. I get so preoccupied with the details and pressure of my schedule, with the hurry and worry of life, that I miss the song of goodness which is waiting to be sung through me. — Joyce Rupp

In recent years we have become much more preoccupied with streamlining and organizing our subject than with maintaining its overall vitality. If we are not careful, a great adventure of the mind will become yet another profession. — Mark Kac

People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road? — Nancy Mitford

The minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them. So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind. — Seneca.

And when you're afraid of someone's judgment, you can't connect with them. You're too preoccupied with the task of impressing them. — Amanda Palmer

He saw her right after the seventh-period bell rang. She seemed dressed for the sole purpose of blending in with the lockers, but she stood out, anyway. It didn't matter that her wide blue eyes were narrowed or that her pretty mouth was twisted into a near snarl - she was blatantly beautiful. It was kind of sick the way Ed was preoccupied with beautiful girls these days.
He felt a little sorry for her. (He was also preoccupied with finding ways of feeling sorry for people.) She was new and trying hard not to look it. She was confused and trying to look tough. It was endearing is what it was. — Francine Pascal

Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another's, and their walk by another's pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own. — Seneca.

Everybody who has dealt with China over an extended period of time has come to more or less the same conclusions. There are nuances of differences, but not fundamental differences. I think that President Bush was heading in this direction, and I have no doubt that he will again wind up in this position. But right now he has to be preoccupied with the atrocity committed in New York and Washington. — Henry A. Kissinger

We tend to manage our lives intellectually - in other words, we get stuck in our heads, keeping ourselves preoccupied with juggling an assortment of activities and responsibilities in order to manage the surface of life. Meanwhile, underneath we feel empty, hungry for meaning, restless, somewhat lost, and frequently ungrounded - as if we aren't really inhabiting our own bodies. This is why we keep ourselves so busy. It's one way to distract ourselves, at least temporarily, from experiencing the low-grade inner anxiety that haunts us. Change — Sonia Choquette

There are some people whose opinion I value and respect and it would be very bothersome if I forfeited their respect. But the general public? I'm not preoccupied with the opinions of others. — Conrad Black

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of seconds necessary for the boiling of an egg, he perceived, after waiting a minute, that he held the egg in his hand, and had placed his seconds watch (an instrument of great value on account of its mathematical precision) to boil!
This absence of mind reminds one of the mathematician Ampere, who one day, as he was going to his course of lectures, noticed a little pebble on the road; he picked it up, and examined with admiration the mottled veins. All at once the lecture which he ought to be attending to returned to his mind; he drew out his watch; perceiving that the hour approached, he hastily doubled his pace, carefully placed the pebble in his pocket, and threw his watch over the parapet of the Pont des Arts. — Camille Flammarion

Garner had to search for his little girl in this endless sea of irrelevancy and indifference and preoccupied people and deteriorating places. This is crazy, this is hopeless ... — John Shirley

Wide awake to the presence of God, I realized I had been so focused on asking why a good God allowed bad things to happen that I was missing out on the nearness of God all along. In becoming preoccupied with the why, I was missing the who. — Margaret Feinberg

When a woman dresses modestly, I can take her seriously as a woman because she doesn't look like she's begging for attention. She knows that she's worth discovering. Such humility is radiant. Unfortunately, many women are so preoccupied with turning men's heads that they overlook their power to turn our hearts. — Jason Evert

People with power do not regulate their behavior as much. They become egocentric and preoccupied with their own self-interest, which eclipses their awareness of the interests of others. — Dean M. Schroeder

Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king's command or a people's favour. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that. — Seneca.

It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody. — Lynne Truss

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. — Graham Greene

I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research. — Douglass North

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this-that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels. — Francis Bacon

Bonaventure's theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once it lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in - and delighting in - an all-pervasive plan that is already in place. — Richard Rohr

Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them. — Samuel Johnson

We must not become so preoccupied looking for "major" miracles that we miss all the daily ones. — Mark Hart

It is the observer of the pun that makes it, my dear Brumm. Of course, when the word is distorted, as in Evilution, the most preoccupied notice it, but in this instance which you try to fasten upon me the crime is yours. There is nothing more contrary to the Evolutionary will than puns. Bloodshed and desolation follow in their wake. Their English heyday, which was in the reign of James I, caused the great civil war; in France they flourished most rankly under Louis XV, and produced the French Revolution. I have considered puns, and apart altogether from their hateful effect, as shown in history, it is certain that they are quite unevolutionary, because I, the fittest of men, am unable to make them. You will consult your own welfare, and that of the nation, Brougham, by refraining in future. — John Davidson

One thing is certain: our families are important. Don't get so stressed out and so preoccupied that we neglect one of the greatest things that God has given us, and that's our families. — Victoria Osteen

When the mind is full of memories and preoccupied by the future, it misses the freshness of the present moment. In this way, we fail to recognize the luminous simplicity of mind that is always present behind the veils of thought. — Matthieu Ricard

Early-stage religion is largely preparing you for the immense gift of this burning, this inner experience of God, as though creating a proper stable into which the Christ can be born. Unfortunately, most people get so preoccupied with their stable, and whether their stable is better than your stable, or whether their stable is the only "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic" stable, that they never get to the birth of God in the soul. There is no indication in the text that Jesus demanded ideal stable conditions; in fact, you could say that the specific mentioning of his birth in a "manger" is making the exact opposite point. Animals at least had room for him, while there was "no room for him in the inn" (Luke 2:8) where humans dwelled. As — Richard Rohr

With this and this - and he touched one of the canine teeth and that below it - the little children can be bitten." Unaesthetic as it may seem, vampires bite out of one side of the mouth, and one side only, which is only common sense. The upper canines in themselves are little more than daggers, useless in tearing flesh without employing the lower canines to help pin the skin together. Preoccupied with the erotic, the cinema necessarily rides roughshod over such technicalities. — Clive Leatherdale

Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. — Leo Tolstoy

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? — Barbara Ehrenreich

The church has been preoccupied with the question, 'What happens to your soul after you die?' AS IF THE REASON FOR JESUS COMING CAN BE SUMMED UP IN, 'JESUS IS TRYING TO HELP GET MORE SOULS INTO HEAVEN, AS OPPOSED TO HELL, AFTER THEY DIE.' I JUST THINK A FAIR READING OF THE GOSPELS BLOWS THAT OUT OF THE WATER. I don't think that the entire message and life of Jesus can be boiled down to that bottom line — Brian D. McLaren

A kind soul knows impoliteness is just preoccupied with distraction. — Michael Dolan

In Globetrotter, David Albahari explores the consciousness of emigres from the former Yugoslavia, Croatia and Serbia, showing that while abroad, many of us are even more intensely preoccupied with our histories than we were while living in Yugoslavia. His narrative structured out of realistic details and perceptions with self-conscious meditation blending history, civilization and its discontents, and personal experience reaches a density and intensity akin to Krasznahorkai's and Thomas Bernhard's. An intensely idiosyncratic narrative, enjoyable and thoughtful. — Josip Novakovich

If I am preoccupied with the changes my storm has created and concentrating on my scars, I will not be able to recognize Jesus. — Jan Harrison

Death is so preoccupied with life, that is has no time for anything else. — Mikhail Turovsky