Attention Quotes

Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21)

I don't judge people.
It blurs out the center of my attention,
my focus,
myself.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."
[
Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade)
, Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.

It's not at all hard to understand a person; it's only hard to listen without bias.

A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe its because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe thats where phrases like deadly dull or excruciatingly dull come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something thats dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole things pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractlybut surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets checkouts, airport gates, SUVs backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I cant think anyone really believes that todays so-called information society is just about information. Everyone knows its about something else, way down.

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.

Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.

Anyone who teaches me deserves my respect, honoring and attention.

Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures.

Don't pretend to be what you're not, instead, pretend to what you want to be, it is not pretence, it is a journey to self realization.

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
Source: The Wisdom of Heschel

It seems as if Americans like to be the center of attention even after they're dead.

You can't get attention of one who focused on himself.

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
{
Speech accepting the
John Burroughs
Medal
}

The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention...

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone.
So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach.
In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

There are so many attention whores out there, prostituting for people's acknowledgment

The biggest enemies of willpower: temptation, self-criticism, and stress. (...) these three skills —self-awareness, self-care, and remembering what matter most— are the foundation for self-control.

Truly? That whole determined, dangerous saunter across the room was for
me
? In that case, would you mind going back and doing it all over again? Slowly this time, and with feeling.

A Thousand Mornings
All night my heart makes its way
however it can over the rough ground
of uncertainties, but only until night
meets and then is overwhelmed by
morning, the light deepening, the
wind easing and just waiting, as I
too wait (and when have I ever been
disappointed?) for redbird to sing

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

To a man, sex is the ultimate expression of love. It is pure pleasure. But to a woman there exists something greater than pleasure―gestures of adoration. A gentle caress on the cheek, an attentive smile, a soft kiss while swept away in a slow dance, the whispered words
'You're beautiful'
―these are the tokens of love that women cherish.

Humans don’t make sense.
If you’re only now learning that, Kaladin said, then you haven’t been paying attention.

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.

When you experience a negative circumstance or event, do not dwell on it. Be proactive — put your attention on what you need to do to bring the situation to a positive result.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time or enough money to change the world. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Gandhi, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci and Jesus Christ.

The way to get a man interested and to hold his interest was to talk about himself, and then gradually lead the conversation around yourself—and keep it there.

Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.

Cabel gives her a quizzical look. "I am totally not getting enough attention here.

If you feel obsessed to prove something to the world,
then you'd need world attention to be able to prove it.

An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?

...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...

What the hell do I have to do to get your attention? Do I need to get up there? I throw an arm toward the stage. His eyes swell for just a second, in shock. He reaches forward to hold my hands, but he catches himself in time and instead folds them across his chest. Believe me, you have my full attention.

There wasn't a woman alive who could resist a man who paid attention to her, who made her feel like she was the only other person in his world.

Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14)