I have a very simple mantra and it's this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That's my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists. . . in the loved one, perfection.
Beware of Destination Addiction. . . a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job and with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are.
My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We'll see about that.
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.
The point isn't to deny our Egos, but to extricate ourselves from our exclusive preoccupation with them.
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation. . . discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
I felt sidelined by the industry, by the preoccupation with finding something newer, younger.
Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.
How tragic it is that so often we stop everything just as we reach the starting line. We must move past the narcissistic preoccupation with getting the love we think 'works' for us. The point of love is to make us grow, not to make us immediately happy. Many of us have forsworn the chance for the deepest love in reaching out for the easier one.
The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words “going along”. We simply go along with the values and practices of society.
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and you do not learn.
Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.
We label judges with having the meanest motives, and yet we desire that our reputation and fame should depend upon the judgment of men, who are all, either from their jealousy or preoccupation or want of intelligence, opposed to us - and yet despite their bias, just for the sake of making these men decide in our favor, we peril in so many ways both our peace and our life.