Preoccupied Quotes
More Preoccupied Quotes
In 1939 I wrote my first article ("Intime banaliteter" [Intimate banalities] in the journal Helhesten ) in which I expressed my love for sofa painting, and for the last twenty years I have been preoccupied with the idea of rendering homage to it. Thus I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection. Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.
asger jorn— As quoted in On the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: the Situationist International, 1957-1972 (1989), edited by Elisabeth Sussman, p. 142
Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?
ellen willis— "Women and the Myth of Consumerism", Ramparts (1969)
There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
Norman Kingsley Mailer— 1959 Advertisements for Myself,'The Homosexual Villain'.
There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.
norman mailer— "The Homosexual Villain"
— This has also been misquoted as: "There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality."
I've always felt that stylists such as you have in America are ashamed of a car and are preoccupied with making it look like something else, like a submarine or an airship...As an engineer, I revolt against this.
alec issigonis— The New York Times [1]
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— Chapter 1, p. 5
People … become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.
Herbert Spencer— Ethics (New York:1915), § 14, pp. 38-39
Kissinger was, as always, preoccupied with other matters of state and his rather complicated social life.
john stockwell— In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (1978), Prologue; ISBN 0393057054
Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.
alexis de tocqueville— Book Three, Chapter XXI
In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.
richard weaver— p. 53 (Ideas have Consequences (1948))
Because the Systems Age is teleologically oriented, it is preoccupied with systems that are goal-seeking or purposeful, that is, systems that can display choice of either means or ends, or both. It is interested in purely mechanical systems only.
— p.18 (Redesigning the future, 1974)
In Paris one is too preoccupied by what one sees and what one hears, however strong one is; what I am doing here has, I think, the merit of not resembling anyone, because it is simply the expression of what I myself have experienced.
— Claude Monet, 1868 letter to Frédéric Bazille from Étretat, December 1868; As cited in: Mary Tompkins Lewis (2007) Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. p. 83
The introduction of the Shiva as the central deity to the form, a god who incinerates impurity introduced to Bharata Natyam, a modality quite outside that of devadasi dance, a dance preoccupied with cataloguing the infinite shadings of feeling in love.
— In "Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts: Translating Traditions" p.97
Death is so preoccupied with life, that is has no time for anything else.
— Mikhail Turovsky (b. 1933), Russian-American artist and aphorist. Itch of Wisdom (Cicuta Press, 1986).
Because the Systems Age is teleologically oriented, it is preoccupied with systems that are goal-seeking or purposeful, that is, systems that can display choice of either means or ends, or both. It is interested in purely mechanical systems only.
— Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the Future (1974)
Kissinger was, as always, preoccupied with other matters of state and his rather complicated social life.
— In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (1978), Prologue; ISBN 0393057054
