Quotes About Attention

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.

Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

In questi soffocati processi decisionali, io dimostravo una soglia d'attenzione pari a quella di un adolescente drogato.

The more strikingly visual your presentation is, the more people will remember it.

an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.

Si mantienes los ojos abiertos, siempre estarás perdido

was it Martin Luther who told of a time when he was focused intently on the person and work of Christ? The Holy Spirit was there as if in the form of a dove, gently alight on his shoulder, and when Luther turned his attention to the Spirit and away from Christ, the dove flew away. This story may go too far in the other direction, but I believe it contains at least a modest lesson

But today I'm all medulla oblongata and I can't concentrate.

Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war. Tourist aren't even allowed to take photos with the building in the background, so when the sailor-suited family of Navy veterans four generations deep handed me a disposable camera and asked me to follow at a distance and secretly take photos of them while they snapped to attention, saluted, and flashed peace signs for no apparent reason, I was only too happy to serve my country.

Another force that can make pain valuable is its power to focus the mind. Whatever the negatives of physical pain—or of emotions such as horror and disgust—they sure are attention grabbers.

As usual in psychology, the negative is more powerful than the positive.

Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We're constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

Our selectivity in who to care about makes a difference. About twenty years ago, Walter Isaacson expressed his frustration over the American public's focus on the crisis in Somalia and relative disregard of the (objectively greater) tragedy in the Sudan, when he plaintively asked: "Will the world end up rescuing Somalia while ignoring the Sudan mainly because the former proves more photogenic?" Before

Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts.

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks.

The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.

Her attention drifted as a roaring filled her ears. Smoke was the smell of battle for all of history, smoke and blood and fear. I wonder how real it is to the masses on Earth who rely on us to keep them safe? The entire concept of war for most of the twenty billion Flatlanders was formed by thirty-second holocasts broadcast to their homes after dinner, smoke free.

single-issue pressure groups driven by 'activists' have replaced pragmatic coalitions, while 'activism' has come to mean 'drawing attention' – ostensibly to the chosen issue, but in practice, perhaps most especially to oneself: 'I care about this.

watching them

When you are suffering, you have to force yourself to pay attention to your private conversation, that is, the words you say to yourself that no one else hears.

When amazing realities of the gospel quit commanding your attention, your awe, and your worship, other things in your life will capture your attention instead.

You obey not to get God's attention, but because you have been the object of his attention since before the world began.

When amazing realities of the gospel quit commanding your attention, your awe, and your worship, other things in your life will capture your attention instead. When you quit celebrating grace, you begin to forget how much you need grace, and when you forget how much you need grace, you quit seeking the rescue and strength that only grace can give. This means you begin to see yourself as more righteous, strong, and wise than you actually are, and in so doing, you set yourself up for trouble.

if you begin to want things out of ministry and leadership that you shouldn't want, other areas of calling will not receive the attention from you that they need.