Quotes About Attention

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy.

If your attention is on superfluous aspects that are not part of the story, then you can't be concentrating on the human realities of the piece.

Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose. This creature is one's neighbor.

How much there is to suffer. When was time enough to pay attention to our lighter emotions? And still I recognize, better than most others who will be resurrected, what blessedness is.

I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so only because I seldom hear you breathe

Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben

Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?

And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.

Es giebt ein Wesen, das vollkommen unschädlich ist, wenn es dir in die Augen kommt, du merkst es kaum und hast es gleich wieder vergessen. Sobald es dir aber unsichtbar auf irgendeine Weise ins Gehör gerät, so entwickelt es sich dort, es kriecht gleichsam aus, und man hat Fälle gesehen, wo es bis ins Gehirn vordrang und in diesem Organ verheerend gedieh, ähnlich den Pneumokokken des Hundes, die durch die Nase eindringen. Dieses Wesen ist der Nachbar.

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our future comes upon us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and accidental point when it happens to us as if from the outside.

Oh Malte, we just go on living, and it seems to me that everyone is distracted and busy and no one pays proper attention as we go along. As if a meteor were to fall and no one sees it and no one has made a wish. Never forget to wish for something, Malte.

For I did not yet understand fame, this public demolition of something still forming, onto whose construction site the crowd breaks in, scattering its stones.

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs

We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard.

The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them. It draws the children from their play, the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber: it holds the hearer fast; steals away his feet, that he shall not depart; his memory, that he shall not remember the most pressing affairs; his belief, that he shall not admit any opposing considerations.

curiosity and command attention, attracting us first by their beauty.

Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?

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