Quotes About Attention

Situational awareness.

The girl in 3.7 seemed engrossed in her phone. "What's she doing?" "Candy Crush Saga. Nondigital surveillance is weaponized boredom.

ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention. "If things had gone differently

mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.

Her head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention.

Measure twice, cut once

Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available—for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles.

If the content is sufficiently engrossing, however, you don't need wraparound deep-immersion goggles to shut out the world. You grow your own. You are there. Watching the content you most want to see, you see nothing else.

Hi!' it said, 'wait a minute!

Play not the peacock, looking everywhere about you to see if you be well decked, if your shoes fit well, if your stockings set neatly and clothes handsomely.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

our experience is what we attend to

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.

This is too busy a world for us to stop and wonder whether a man wants what he does not ask for. Too many are clamoring loudly for what we cannot give...

While some of his men were mounting a machine gun in the entrance, Hitler jumped up on a table and to attract attention fired a revolver shot toward the ceiling.

Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistence level, the German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were provided with circuses by their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state. "We had to divert the attention of the masses from material to moral values," Dr. Ley once explained. "It is more important to feed the souls of men than their stomachs.

I admit defeat. I've been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don't know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn't pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn't a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn't want to be what I want to make it.

One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with "tripwires," signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. Think of the way that the low-fuel warning in your car lights up, grabbing your attention.

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it.

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

The problem is that urgencies—the most vivid and immediate circumstances—will always hog our spotlight.

Stay alert to the promise that moments hold.