To me, the irony of this involvement with size, as I observed earlier, is the unwillingness or inability of so many Americans to identify themselves with something as vast as the United States. Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant.
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My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
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A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
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Americans become unhappy and vicious because their preoccupation with amassing possessions obliterates their loneliness. This is why production in America seems to be on such an endless upward spiral: every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.
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Our worst fault is our preoccupation with the faults of others.
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Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
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Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.
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Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
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Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunites for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
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We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection.
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
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Your preoccupation should be on doing what you do as well as you can. What your co-workers say about you, what your opponent is doing -- that doesn't matter.
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To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity
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I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
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Play has been man's most useful preoccupation.
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly
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Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.
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