Attention Quotes

“Mindfulness”

“Distraction”

“Attentional control”

“Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”

“Attention is love. To notice fully—without agenda—is a rare and supreme devotion.”

“Wikipedia: Attention”

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”

“A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.”

“Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?”

“Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.”

“With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought:
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out our powers, and leaves a blank behind.”

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

“I would like to develop a reductionist approach to the problem of attention by focusing on how place cells... create an enduring spatial map only when an organism is paying attention to its surroundings.”

“Attention is a biological phenomenon. When you empty your mind, be that by breath, floatation, meditation, exercise… it works by allowing our brains to do some discharge of the junk and let us go back to work.”

“School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed towards God, is the very substance of prayer.”

“No man is in any degree fit for either business or conversation, who does not command his attention to the present object, be it what it will. When I see a man absent in mind, I choose to be absent in body; for it is almost impossible for me to stay in the room, as I cannot stand inattention and awkwardness.”

“That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants.”

“We may confer a benefit, not only on ourselves, but on others, by diverting attention from the exciting circumstances of the present day—from the disheartening eccentricities of a literature which meanders in a thousand frivolous directions—to the calm regions where the inner man, self-examined, submits himself to moral treatment.”

“If you hold small objects close to your eyes, you limit your field of vision and shut out the world. And, in the same way, the people or the things which stand nearest, even though they are of the very smallest consequence, are apt to claim an amount of attention much beyond their due, occupying us disagreeably, and leaving no room for serious thoughts and affairs of importance. We ought to work against this tendency.”