Quotes About Focus

Our individual as well as communal lives are so deeply molded by our worries about tomorrow that today hardly can be experienced.

However, if I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential. It's so easy to spend your whole time being preoccupied with urgent matters and never starting to live, really live.

When we worry, we have our hearts in the wrong place. Jesus asks us to move our hearts to the center, where all other things fall into place.

Worrying causes us to be "all over the place," but seldom at home.

Distractions mean that we are being pulled into the past or into the future. That is what a distraction is. We start thinking about what happened yesterday or what is happening tomorrow. Distractions mean we are not yet fully here. We are not fully present yet.

Setting our hearts on something involves not only serious aspiration but also strong determination. A spiritual life requires human effort. The forces that keep pulling us back into a worry-filled life are far from easy to overcome.

Gazing is probably the best word to touch the core of Eastern spirituality. Whereas St. Benedict, who has set the tone for the spirituality of the West, calls us first of all to listen, the Byzantine fathers focus on gazing

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Simplify, simplify.

In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way

It's not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else.

It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in the mind

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live.

Our life is frittered away by detail.