Preoccupy Quotes & Sayings

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past. — Will Self

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. — Marcel Duchamp

It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%. — Benjamin Graham

It's interesting to play a role where you don't really have to preoccupy yourself with any need to convince yourself that you're not acting. — Michael C. Hall

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen. — Harper Lee

We believe that the European Union is facing a truly historic choice. — Jean-Pierre Raffarin

I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time. — Susan Orlean

What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to unhappiness in the world at any given time? — Gabrielle Zevin

o not preoccupy yourself with wants or expectations. The world won't abide by the standards, you set in any case, whether you set them too low or too high. It will break them every time for the simple fact that our true essence has no desire, hope or expectation for anything. It has no selfish inclinations of any kind. Everything, it experiences, is a passing phase, not its real identity. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply. — Gustave Eiffel

Preoccupy your mind more and more thinking of strategies, methods of attaining possession in all areas of your life's endeavour. — Sunday Adelaja

As kids, we had no clue about the racial stuff that seemed to preoccupy adults. We just enjoyed our life as kids. — Natalie Cole

onto his cock and smiling as if he just got into bed with David Gandy, which wasn't that far from the truth. Domenico knew his own worth. — K.A. Merikan

When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain. — Robert Kuttner

We are trying to make the world a better place, but that is not necessarily what we accomplish. Many of the problems which preoccupy us are basically insoluble. — George Soros

If the producer doesn't like you, consequently he reads the script with a very negative view. But I wouldn't preoccupy myself with that, I don't give a damn. You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and whatall. — Rod Serling

The nation as the horizon of an identity that you want to come into being as a fundamental absence of something that is compromised, something that needs to be rescued or made - these matters preoccupy the third world writer. It is seductive for a Marxist understanding of literary practice and production in the sense that it says that material culture determines literary output. — Mark McMorris

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world. — Honore De Balzac

It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home. — Dennis Prager

Decision, Decision, Decision! — Lailah Gifty Akita

Wealth is a gift from God, and pride is bequeathed to us from the devil. — Douglas Wilson

For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all. — Wangari Maathai

Food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us. Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart's astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around — Shauna Niequist

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy. — Sherry Turkle

He who is capable of really reading a writer will have his every question answered by the works themselves. For example, Kafka depicts the dreams & visions of his lonely, difficult life and it is these dreams & visions alone that should preoccupy us & not the interpretations that sharp-witted critics can give these writings. Their interpreting is an intellectual sport, one that is good for clever people who can read & write books on African sculpture or 12-tone music but who never get to the heart of works of art because they stand at the gate fumbling with their 100 keys, blind to the fact that the gate is not really locked. — Hermann Hesse

Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life ... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet. — Vita Sackville-West

Who would have thought it possible that a tiny flower could preoccupy a person so completely that there simply wasn't room for any other thought ... — Sophie Scholl

We preoccupy ourselves with what we had - or what we want to have - at the expense of what we have. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Problems assault us to the degree they preoccupy us. The key to release, rest, and inner freedom is not the elimination of all external difficulties. It is letting go of our pattern of reactions to those difficulties. — Hugh Prather

The road to home is when we find our hearts filled with the stories of our people. — Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

With three kids, it was always very, very tight, and it was always a scramble for what was my next job. So I learned never to go into debt because I don't want those monthly payments to preoccupy my thoughts. — William Shatner

Why is human cloning illegal? All it is is making a certain type of person on purpose. Can they possibly be any worse than the assholes we're pumping out by accident? — Richard Jeni

I love being one half of a romantic couple. — Julianna Margulies

Sylvia quotes Dick as telling her: "I am afraid the demands of wifehood and motherhood would preoccupy you too much to allow you to do the painting and writing you want." Dick was sharp enough to understand that the bright flame that drew him to Sylvia disqualified her from his future. He would not allow Sylvia- or any woman- to outshine him. — Elizabeth Winder

In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers. — Henri Lebesgue

The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension. — Guillaume Apollinaire

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. — David Mamet

Which of us would not be preoccupied with thoughts of food if we were suffering from internal starvation? Hunger is such an awful thing that it is classically cited with pestilence and war as one of our three worst burdens. Add to the physical discomfort the emotional stresses of being fat, the taunts and teasing from the thin, the constant criticism, the accusations of gluttony and lack of "will power," and the constant guilt feelings, and we have reasons enough for the emotional disturbances which preoccupy the psychiatrists. — Gary Taubes

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe. — Sebastian Horsley

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless. — Donald Miller

I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me. — M.C. Escher