Self Absorption Quotes - Page 2

David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.

David Bowie

Song, Stars, Distance

Source: www.npr.org

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There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Loneliness, Self, Expression

F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.264, e-artnow

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Serving others breaks you free from the shackles of self and self-absorption that choke out the joy of living.

James Hunter

Self, Joy, Servant Leadership

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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

Adam Gopnik

Sex, Writing, Self

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Love created this world, & the lack of it can kill it. Selfishness, self-absorption , arrogance & indifference never built anything.

John Hope Bryant

Self, Arrogance, World

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They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

Ann Brashares

Self, Survival, Together

Ann Brashares (2011). “Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants): A Novel”, p.58, Random House

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The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency... God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.

Brennan Manning

Fear, Lying, Self

Brennan Manning (2015). “Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging”, p.4, NavPress

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But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.

Dennis Lehane

Eye, Thinking, Often Is

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We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity -- self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness -- are the least attractive in a friend.

Tonya Hurley

Stars, Dna, Self

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Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.

Paul Reiser

Baby, Self, Kicking

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A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished-not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed. A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty. A new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption that deaden our souls and poison our relationships.

Pope Benedict XVI

Life, Christian, Love Is

Eucharistic Celebration On The Occasion Of The 23-rd World Youth Day, w2.vatican.va. July 20, 2008.

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Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .

Timothy Keller

Prayer, Self, Giving

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Hopelessness sets in, when a man is bound up in his shame -- living small, within that closed horizon of fantasy and self-absorption.

Andrew Comiskey

Men, Self, Horizon

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In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.

Clifton Webb

Self, Attention, Justified

"Fictional character: Waldo Lydecker". "Laura", www.imdb.com. 1944.

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Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd

Mark Rippetoe

Bodybuilding, Men, Vanity

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When we don’t put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.

Zeena Schreck

Self, Stopping, Our Actions

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Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.

Leslie Jamison

Sarcastic, Hurt, Clever

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Self-absorption is always a temptation to young people, and if their religion is of a sort to add to this self-absorption, I feel that it is a serious mistake. If I had my way, the whole subject of feelings and emotions in the religious life would be absolutely ignored. Feelings there will be, doubtless, but they must not be in the least depended on, nor in any sense taken as the test or gauge of one's religion. They ought to be left out of the calculation entirely. You may feel good or you may feel bad, but neither the good feeling nor the bad feeling affects the real thing.

Hannah Whitall Smith

Religious, Real, Mistake

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Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.

Rita Mae Brown

Self, Parent, Underestimate

Rita Mae Brown (2011). “Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual”, p.35, Bantam

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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them

Walter Benjamin

Self, Order, World

Walter Benjamin (1977). “The origin of German tragic drama”, New Left Books

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The stories that I want to tell are completely, well somewhat autobiographical. It's completely based on my own self-absorption issues and problems.

Nicole Holofcener

Issues, Self, Stories

Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

Bertrand Russell

Love, Men, Self

Bertrand Russell (2015). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.142, Lulu Press, Inc

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Conscience is the moralized form of self-absorption.

Mason Cooley

Self, Form, Absorption

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My self-absorption warms me; yours boils me.

Mason Cooley

Self, Selfishness, Absorption

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Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment.

Mason Cooley

Baby, Self, Resentment

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