Self Engrossed Quotes & Sayings

It dawned on me I had just ordered the Prince of Teravinea to perform the menial labor of a scullery maid. At first I was ashamed at giving him such an assignment, but when I glanced over at him I noted he was completely engrossed in his chore. I had to turn my face and hide the smile that came to my lips. Only with concentrated effort did I manage to stifle my snicker. — D. Maria Trimble

I'm always reading several books at the same time, depending on how deeply engrossed in it I am, if it's fiction and if it captures me. — Andie MacDowell

I can read every word of your soul, become deeply engrossed in the study of it until I've comprehended every nuance and detail. But then when I'm done, I'll discard it as easily as if it were a newspaper, shaking my head at how the ink has stained my fingers gray. My desire to know every layer of you isn't feigned, but interest isn't love, and I make no promises of forever. Perhaps I do every so often, but you have no business believing me. — M.E. Thomas

This is a book about texts as well as their authors, it is not a textbook so much as a context book and a pretext book, concerned with settings and motives as well as the works themselves. Its success will be measured by the readers who pick up Plato's Republic, Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and find themselves engrossed rather than baffled - and even when they are baffled, are happy to go on reading, interrogating, and arguing with their authors for themselves. — Alan Ryan

Fully engrossed, until now, in picturing romantic ways of seeing him and getting to know him and certain she would carry them out as soon as she wished, she had been living on that yearning and that hope, without, perhaps, realizing it. But this desire had implanted itself into her by sending out a thousand imperceptible roots, which had plunged into all her most unconscious minutes of happiness or melancholy, filling them with a new sap without her knowing where it came from. And now this desire had been ripped out and tossed away as impossible. She felt lacerated, suffering horribly in her entire self, which had been suddenly uprooted; and from the depths of her sorrow through the abruptly exposed lies of her hope, she saw the reality of her love. — Marcel Proust

Beatrix tilted her head back to look at him. Perspiration had given his skin the sheen of polished metal, strong masculine features worked in bronze. His expression was engrossed, as if her body fascinated him, as if she were made of some precious substance he had never encountered before. She felt the soft, hot shock of his breath as he bent to kiss the inside of her wrist. He let the tip of his tongue rest against a tiny pulse. So new, this intimacy with him, and yet it was as necessary as the beat of her own heart.
She never wanted to be out of his arms again. She wanted to be with him always. — Lisa Kleypas

The world that you see is like a motion picture. We are engrossed in a film and we have forgotten that we're sitting in a movie theatre. — Frederick Lenz

A reader of The Unspeakables recently contacted me. She said she had become so engrossed with the paperback she'd taken it to the top of a Munro whilst climbing on the Isle of Mull. I'm delighted to have three-dimensional circulation as well. — Peter F. Jemison

Ron's ears turned bright red and he become engrossed in a tuft of grass at his feet, which he prodded with his toe 'he must've known I'd run out on you'.
'No', Harry corrected him, 'He must've known you'd always want to come back — J.K. Rowling

I spent a few minutes fully engrossed in the textbook, having forgotten where I was and why I was there, the highest compliment one can pay a book, I suppose. — Neve Maslakovic

Toward Florence he was specially drawn by the fact that Alfieri now lived there; but, as often happens after such separations, the reunion was a disappointment. Alfieri, indeed, warmly welcomed his friend; but he was engrossed in his dawning passion for the Countess of Albany, and — Edith Wharton

When the mind and the Self (Soul) become engrossed (tanmayakar) only then it is called artadhyan (mournful contemplation that hurts the self), and also one does not become aware that artadhyan has occurred. And if one realizes that artadhyan has occurred, then it is not called artadhyan; then it is the mind. — Dada Bhagwan

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten. — Washington Irving

We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play. — Charles E. Schaefer

Don't be too engrossed with things of the world; discover your purpose in life — Sunday Adelaja

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. — Ian McEwan

Christianity is not engrossed by this transitory world, but measures all things by the thought of eternity. — John Gresham Machen

'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book. — Jonathan Dee

If I can't laugh at the fool I am I'll despair at the beast I am. You must laugh at yourself, Michael."
"I expect you're right," he said. "One must come out on the other side of despair before one can find that stony sanctuary."
"And laughing at yourself gives you freedom."
"From what?" asked Michael grimly.
"From hating yourself. One can be just as self-engrossed in self-hatred as self-love, and either way be as blind to the quality of those about you ... — Elizabeth Goudge

Let's begin with a quotation from mindfulness expert and teacher Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. It beautifully encapsulates what deceptive brain messages are, what they do to you, and how they keep you from following the path of your true self: We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those [thoughts] for reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears, endlessly seeking security.16 To phrase it another way: We spend a considerable amount of our time engrossed in following deceptive brain messages until we begin to see them for what they are and value our true emotions and needs. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed in a book. Which would delight you more - if it were 'Twilight' or 'Middlemarch?' — Michael Gove

Loving yourself has nothing to do with being selfish, self-centered or self-engrossed. It means that you accept yourself for what you are. Loving yourself means that you accept responsibility for your own development, growth and happiness. — Iyanla Vanzant

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy. — Sherry Turkle

If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control. — John Wooden

What she had come to understand ... was that mourning was no crime. it wasn't her feeling all boo-hoo sorry for herself, or being disgustingly self - engrossed, it was what you had to do to go on. — Julia Gregson

But I could see that she was not having the same experience as me, she was lying as before, with eyes closed, mouth half-open, breathing heavily, engrossed in what I had been engrossed, but was not any longer. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I believe, indeed, that what I could not refrain from saying to him on this head had the effect of inducing him to push on. While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention. — Edgar Allan Poe

You do it for the highs, when you're totally engrossed and everything's flowing and whatever you want, you get. It's like magic. That's why you play the game. That's what it's for. That's why you work. — Greg Rusedski

NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to
mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even
if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot
of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing
generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment,
that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly
stuck to its work through the course of a long life.
preface to the second edition of the world as will and representation — Arthur Schopenhauer

Why me?" she finally asked.
Sighing, I touched the end of her hair, fingering it slightly. It felt so silky. "You were the first person I saw at this school. I'd parked in the lot and was walking past the auditorium and saw this gorgeous girl come out of the music room. The sun hit your stunning red hair, and it shone so brightly it almost looked like you had a halo. You were staring down at some music you were holding, and you started humming something. I froze. I just stood there and watched you walk by. You were so engrossed you didn't even notice me." I twisted the loop of her hair around my finger. — Lacey Weatherford

Thought is actually something that is dead, it is not a living thing. If 'oneself' gets engrossed in what is dead, then it will become alive. — Dada Bhagwan

Sometimes in the late evenings one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks - bed-making, washing, one errand and another - and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon behind a crooked tree.
The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind. — Enid Bagnold

I do not mean to say that I viewed those desires of mine that deviated from accepted standards as normal and orthodox; nor do I mean that I labored under the mistaken impression that my friends possessed the same desires. Surprisingly enough, I was so engrossed in tales of romance that I devoted all my elegant dreams to thoughts of love between man and maid, and to marriage, exactly as though I were a young girl who knew nothing of the world. I tossed my love for Omi onto the rubbish heap of neglected riddles, never once searching deeply for its meaning. Now when I write the word love, when I write affection, my meaning is totally different from my understanding of the words at that time. I never even dreamed that such desires as I had felt toward Omi might have a significant connection with the realities of my life. — Yukio Mishima

Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking. — Eckhart Tolle

A man engrossed in sensual pleasures may form a mistaken out look
upon life and
think that he enjoys life more than others do. But soon he realizes his
mistake as not long
after this he is reduced to a mere slave to his blind passions,
He is doomed to a perpetual
life of deprivation and restlessness, for animal desires once run ra
mpant are never
satisfied: they are rather sharpened all the more and degrade ma
n to lower levels of
animalism where all his efforts are focused on one object: how to
derive the maximum
possible sensual pleasure in life? — Mohammad Qutub

The insomnia I am talking about results from a mild state of possession, harmless to those around you, who sometimes even fail to notice it. It usually comes when you are completely engrossed in your work and overtakes you so completely that every aspect of your daily life becomes mechanical and provides only a colorless backdrop to action occurring only in your mind. It matters not whether at this time you are asleep or awake. The secret life pulses within you, and when you wake in the middle of the night you realize there is no way to stem its flow. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

I walk around engrossed in my stories and worlds, and I love losing myself in them! — Samuel Colbran

On one occasion when [William] Smart found him engrossed with his fundamental theory, he asked Eddington how many people he thought would understand what he was writing-after a pause came the reply, 'Perhaps seven.' — Arthur Eddington

Perhaps the basic thing which contributes to charm is the ability to forget oneself and be engrossed in other people. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Yet Theo had become engrossed in his own tale, transporting himself back to the night of which he spoke. In the distance, he could again see the faces he had encountered on that fateful night, the twisted bodies and pained expressions of the men who no longer walked the realms of men, but those of the underworld gods. — A.H. Septimius

There is no existence so content as that whose present is engrossed by employment, and whose future is filled by some strong hope, the truth of which is never proved. Toil and illusion are the only secrets to make life tolerable ... — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

By stressing intrinsic value in thought. And it is true that when men have become engrossed in practical devices they are apt to narrow their field of vision and lose sight of the interconnection of the various branches of knowledge. More than that, as is now the case, they will even forget the larger principles they have applied, and on which their well-being depends. — Isabel Paterson

Please be careful of becoming so immersed and engrossed in pixels, texting, ear buds, Twittering, online social networking, and potentially addictive uses of media and the Internet that you fail to recognize the importance of your physical body and miss the richness of person-to-person communication. Beware of the digital displays and data in many forms of computer-mediated interaction that can displace the full range of physical capacity and experience. — David A. Bednar

The more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person — Fyodor Dostoyevsky