Quotes About Attention

We feel loved when we receive attention, acceptance, appreciation, and affection, and when we are allowed the freedom to live in accord with our own deepest needs and wishes.

When you are given attention, your intuitions are treated as if they matter. You are taken seriously. You are given credit when it is due. Your feelings have such high value to those who love you that they are on the lookout for them. They even look for the feelings you are afraid to know and gently inquire whether you want to show them.

In attention, you are heard and noticed. In acceptance, you are embraced as worthy, not compared to your siblings but trusted, empowered, understood, and fully approved of as you are in your uniqueness.

Attention from others leads to self-respect. Acceptance engenders a sense of being inherently a good person. Appreciation generates a sense of self-worth. Affection makes us feel lovable. Allowing gives us encouragement to pursue our own deepest needs, values, and wishes.

Attention means bringing something or someone into focus so it is no longer blurred by the projections of your own ego; thus it requires genuine interest and curiosity about the mysterious and surprising truth that is you.

Mindfulness is a habit, it's something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort…it's a skill that can be learned. It's accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn't difficult. What's difficult is to remember to be mindful.

One final insight about prioritizing involves getting disciplined about what you don't put on the stage. This means not thinking when you don't have to, becoming disciplined about not paying attention to non-urgent tasks unless, or until, it's truly essential that you do.

Without this ability to stand outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time, goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult. You need this capacity to free yourself from the automatic flow of experience, and to choose where to direct your attention. Without a director you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.

No one responds or even looks at him. It's as if he didn't say it. If an accountant says words in a kitchen and no one listens, did he make a sound?

didn't even know that Dani knew Laurie and Andy. My instinct is to complain about this; I hate when people pay attention to my birthday. I especially hate when people do things behind my back, even when they are well-intentioned. But I don't want to be an asshole; Dani went out of her way to do something nice. It's going to happen anyway, so there's nothing to be gained by acting like my normal, idiotic self. It's possible I may be maturing.

Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication. The act of paying close attention to what someone made, in all of its particulars, is what stimulates an authentic, as opposed to a conditioned, response.

We're not in an Age of Politics, we're in an Age of Netflix. It's who can tell the most compelling story who wins.

Always be aware of what you are doing.

But children nowadays don't believe in magic. They are forever watching TV and playing computer games. They never look to the skies any more.

That's why we need to pay attention when an adolescent spends hours playing violent video games while his window of opportunity to develop healthy relationships is open wide.

The science of replacement says that in order for us to be better people, our goals should be to replace our worst habits and focus our attention in other places.

What I have not seen or failed to see I leave as a gift.

Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn't based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.

Only those who put more energy into self-pity than into paying attention are truly marooned.

John ducked casually across some DO NOT DUCK CASUALLY ACROSS THIS TAPE tape

You are now aware that your lower jaw has weight, and that it requires effort for you to hold it up. Good evening.

doing an excellent job of ignoring

Did you doze off there?" He shook my hand. "Uh, no. I was just tryin' to rub somethin' off the back of my eyelid.

Better to be looked over than overlooked. You want to walk into that funeral and have every dude in that room whip their head around and say, 'God-damn them is some fine-ass titties. I got to find me a divorce lawyer in the next five minutes.