Quotes About Obsession

Sitting with a deck of cards in your hand all day is an obsession. Visiting print shops and bookstores and libraries is an obsession. And writing about this is an obsession. I think, in general, most collectors are obsessed. I think the only form of a rationalized greed is when you're collecting something you are supposedly serious about.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

We have this cultural obsession with work and productivity as if we're better people if we don't stop and take some time for ourselves.

I have an unswayable obsession with death. If there was a magical pill that one could take that would retire you from the world, I would take it.

On who the flies landed without being chased away by that person, was on her way to death - this was one of the unmistakeable signs. From that time on, I think, dates my obsession with flies. In times of peace, when we all lied still, I made sure to sneak close up to my mother, watching very carefully that no fly would land on her, - I waved my hat over her body, flies don't like wind and movement.

All people talk of money sometimes, everywhere. But not for all people, everywhere, is money the addiction, the obsession, the stimulant, that it seems to be in New York. It is a large part of the clamor, and it is the voice - quite literally - of the man in the street.

People can get obsessed with romance, they can get obsessed with political paranoia, they can get obsessed with horror. It's isn't the fault of the subject matter that creates the obsession, I don't think.

For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.

I say Democrats should not be afraid to talk about the morality of life, of caring for children who are born. It seems the Republican obsession with being pro-life lasts about nine months. After that, it’s each baby for herself.

Sunglasses are a bit like watches for me - a real obsession. My favourites are Oakleys, Ray-Bans and Wileys, which are worn by the U.S. military.

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

Man's obsession to add to his wealth and honor is the chief source of his misery.

..the writer's obsession - the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

It's been an obsession of various genres, disciplines, and aspects and elements of movie-making. It's always been something that I've really aspired to, so doing something new and different, reinventing myself and working with new people is just the passport to the amazing world that is the movies.

I learn from thinking about the future, what hasn't been done yet. That's kind of my constant obsession.

The obsession with economic profit and technical efficiency puts the human rhythms of life at risk.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

The danger in mysticism is that you push yourself too far into the nagual too soon. This is obsession.

I only have one obsession - not to be boring.

I have never appreciated a quiet moment with a friend as much, a quiet moment with a book and I think part of that is my obsession with being older and time going faster and it's become increasingly sweeter for me.

I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.

During an intense period of lab work, the outside world vanishes and the obsession is total. Sleep is when you can curl up on the accelerator floor for an hour.

To be the object of somebody's obsession is a really awful feeling when you can't return it.

Being a martial artist for many years, it has become a bit of an obsession of mine to bring that part of my life to the screen.

A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings...it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy.

The element of obsession is terribly important for an artist.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Rather than a profession, photography has always been a passion for me, a passion closer to an obsession.

If you can come to this nowness without sex, sex, by and by will become useless, it will disappear. It will not be a desire then. If you want to move in it you can move into it as a fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it because you are not dependent on it.

In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer.... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either.

The danger to power is obsession - power junkies. You need a very strong mind and humor to balance yourself. If you don't, you will get shredded.

Most organizations only focus on WHAT they do and HOW they do it - tactics and strategies - and they aren't even aware that this thing called the WHY exists. Focusing on only two pieces of a three piece puzzle leaves an organization, or a career, inherently out of balance. Being out of balance, only operating on two of the three pieces, shows up in different ways - increased stress, loss of passion, obsession with what your competition is doing, being forced to play the price game, trouble differentiating. These are all signs that the WHY is missing.

There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.

I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.

I have a ships bed, which totally plays to my obsession of, if I were not an actress, I would be a pirate.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

You must have complete determination. The worst opponent you can come across is one whose aim has become an obsession. For instance, if a man has decided that he is going to bite off your nose no matter what happens to him in the process, the chances are he will succeed in doing it. He may be severely beaten up, too, but that will not stop him from carrying out his objective. That is the real fighter.

The world loves a clone and a good knock-off. It cheats the artist... In the obsession for technical wizardry, people disappear; and if your voice isn't present in a relationship, you don't matter.

We break off obsession by laughing at ourselves, by learning to be funny, by just seeing the joy in life and by having a terrific love for this world.

Yes, because it's Len's obsession with practical. I've never really had that experience that I hear people having of being on an empty soundstage painted green talking to a tennis ball on a stick.

In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life.

Aristocratic depression has this cosmic dimension to it, where it's asking these big questions about, "Why?" "What is the purpose of all this?" Neuroses of the middle class is the banishment of aristocratic depression, because it's kind of this obsession with quotidian detail that pushes these larger questions away.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the idealization obsession, the sexual afterglow, the profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

Try not to compare your children, even if you think you are skillful at it. You may say most positively that "Susan is pretty and Sandra is bright," but all Susan will remember is that she isn't bright and Sandra that she isn't pretty. Praise each child individually for what that child is and help him or her escape our culture's obsession with comparing, competing, and never feeling we are "enough.

The budget idea, I may admit, is a sort of obsession with me. I believe in budgets. I want other people to believe in them. I have had a small one to run my own home; and besides that, I am the head of the organization that makes the greatest of all budgets, that of the United States Government. Do you wonder, then, that at times I dream of balance sheets and sinking funds?