Quotes About Attention

they explained that reducing anxiety meant paying attention to how much they could do and how much was too much, and learning how to say, "Enough." They got very clear on what was important to them and when they could let something go.

The real questions for parents should be: "Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?" If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time.

Researchers Rachel and Stephen Kaplan found that there are four essential elements of a restorative environment: a sense of getting away a feeling of immersion holding attention without effort and compatibility with one's preferences.

Disengagement: Are people afraid to take risks or try new things? Is it easier to stay quiet than to share stories, experiences, and ideas? Does it feel as if no one is really paying attention or listening? Is everyone struggling to be seen and heard?

I hoped like hell they all had been paying attention…

Sometimes, people have a tendency not to notice someone who's always there, even if that person's the best thing for them.

But here is an important thing: you must practice not perfunctorily, but with all your intelligence and love,

There's no bad publicity except an obituary.

There is no such thing as bad publicity...except your own obituary

Life can be taken out of others in rivulets and drops, in the small daily failures of inattention, that bitterest fruit of self-absorption, as surely as by terrible strokes to their hearts.

Jesus says, "A tidal wave is approaching and you are lollygagging on the patio having a party." Or as Joachim Jeremias puts it, "You are feasting and dancing—on the volcano which may erupt at any moment."3

None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

Even if Zen is not currently undergoing the same kind of core doctrinal crisis as Christianity is for some, we should pay attention to suspicious critiques as well as to sympathetic interpretations of the Zen tradition.

But in this respect I do not think I am much worse off than the girls who take notes. If the mind is occupied with the mechanical process of hearing and putting words on paper at pell-mell speed, I should not think one could pay much attention to the subject under consideration or the manner in which it is presented.

am in revolt against the recent fashion of attaching so much weight to political ideology. For the last fifty years, we have paid too much attention to political differences, just as we used to pay too much attention to religious differences.

I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)

Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk.

Don't read too fast," she said.

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

The word listen in Latin is audire. If we listen with full attention in which we are totally geared to listen, it's called ob-audire, and that's where the word obedience comes from. Jesus is the obedient one. That means he is total ear, totally open to the love of God. And if we are closed, and to the degree that we are closed, we are surdus. That is the Latin word for deaf. The more "deaf" we get, the more absurdus

It wasn't that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and so refocused my whole attention.

Our primary task in solitude, therefore, is not to pay undue attention to the many faces which assail us, but to keep the eyes of our mind and heart on him who is our divine savior.

I asked him how he had been able to take such a splendid picture. With a smile he said, "Well, I had only to be very patient and very attentive. It was only after a few hours of compliments that the lily was willing to let me take her picture.

When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs. Our