Quotes About Attention

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

There are so many stimuli vying for your attention—sounds, places, people, smells, and your own thoughts rattling around in your head. You only have so much attentional energy and it will make you happier, more efficient, and healthier if you are able to focus it properly.

as a rule, we are all happier when we give activities, like talking to friends, our full attention.

The ways in which you can reallocate your attention to be happier are best understood from three separate but related perspectives: deciding, designing, and doing.

We don't really allocate unconscious attention in any meaningful way—it just gets allocated without us having to make any real decision about what is attended to. But, as we shall see, you can consciously select the environments that your unconscious attention can roam in. Although you can't consciously dictate how your dog runs around a field, you can choose which park you take it to. We are a lot like dogs in how we react to situational triggers.

If mindless eating is the problem, then paying attention to what you eat through salient feedback will be a big part of the solution.

Our attention is attracted to what's new, remember, so using varied skills focuses our attention on them, thus making purpose more salient.

Distraction will, of course, interrupt attending to experiences; one survey reported

No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.

In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity's inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate in our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this most important topic before this virulent madness destroys us.

in the gun industry, all publicity is good publicity, and high-profile enmity from anti-gun forces is the best publicity of all.

Super gun,' can you imagine?" Karl Walter would muse more than two decades later. Shaking his head, he chuckled. "You can't buy that kind of attention, not for $50 million, not for $100 million.

We begin to resemble what we focus on. If we devote our lives to our jobs, then we mentally take the office to our daughter's lacrosse game.

Yap, yap little dog.

David's charm, which he'd learned to focus with dazzling effectiveness. He'd take words out of his companion's sentences and repeat them, as if they had crystallized thoughts in his own mind; when bumping into someone again, he'd act as if he'd been barely able to function in the intervening minutes. Sometimes, talking to him, the objects of his attention would experience that giddy, tingly feeling you get when you're in love.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Ce qui m'intéresse n'est pas toujours ce qui m'importe.

the modern media is the mass media and they understand only four things. Every story carried by the modern media involves one of these four things: sex, scandal, violence and celebrity culture. If a story does not include one of those four elements, it isn't a story and it becomes difficult if not impossible to get the message out. So, you have to tie your story to one of the four elements to ensure that it is picked up and that you get your message out. (p. 125)

It's wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn't paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted.

I've just begin to realize that the capacity to be interested is a luxury, you know? It gets handed down like property.

Do you think I'm only here when you look at me?

He was hanging up his suit. She watched him straighten the pants. "You ought to throw out the underwear you're wearing," she said. "It's about to fall apart." "I like it when they get so soft, after I've had them a long time.