#preoccupation

At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. ↗

— Salvatore Quasimodo

#been #continuity #decorum #easy #explosion

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#else #freely #living #more #more than anything

Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#anxiety #apprehension #endless #forever #may

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history. ↗

— Penelope Lively

#interest #memory #operation #preoccupation #rather

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#busyness #life #living #mind #preoccupation

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#absurdly #all things #become #beneath #earth

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find. ↗

— Freda Adler

#another #controversies #era #find #knowledge

Setting up a community and seeing what happens to it when the megalomaniacs get busy: that's my main preoccupation. ↗

— Louis de Bernieres

#community #get #happens #main #preoccupation

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress. ↗

— Wynton Marsalis

#human #human progress #maybe #our #overshadowed