...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
— Chinua Achebe
Special Absentminded quotations
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
I can make things, but I don't cook them, exactly.
Like salmon, I can stick that in a pan. Or the other day I made noodles, but they were hard. It never occurred to me to check them; I just stopped cooking them when I felt they were ready. Really, I'm too absentminded.
It's true that I tend to daydream. I'm the same person in business as I am in music: I can be distracted and absentminded. It's my style.
I was sitting here without a shirt on, absentmindedly scratching my back with a pen for about five minutes and I just looked in the mirror and saw that I had drawn a nice mural on my back. It looks kind of like a map of Wyoming, with all the rivers and mountain ranges, or maybe a portrait of Bob Marley. Yes. Tablature
Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king, It is said, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later- Ka'a Orto'o, Gnomic Utterances
The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
If you are not lax when at leisure, you will be effective when busy.
If you are not absentminded in tranquility, that will be useful in action. If you are not hypocritical in private, that will show up in public.
A man of genius is not a man who sees more than other men do.
On the contrary, it is very often found that he is absentminded andobserves much less than other people.... Why is it that the public have such an exaggerated respect for him--after he is dead? The reason is that the man of genius understands the importance of the few things he sees.
Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search.
I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.