Quotes About Focus

without thought, for you are not ready for thought

Someone asked Rodin how he could sculpt an elephant out of marble. It's easy, he responded, "You just chip away everything that isn't an elephant." Chip away everything that isn't your point.

There is a qigong saying, "When the intent (yi) arrives, the qi [life force] arrives." This means that the more your mind is focused on what you are doing, the more qi you can develop and control.

Why waste energy with wasted movements?] Very commonly, tightening and furrowing the brow while concentrating... Is the brain a muscle that works better by tensing the skull?

Relaxation is the key to speed and quicker reaction time.

The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it

Software development is a game of insight, and insight comes to the prepared, rested, relaxed mind.

Pair programmers: Keep each other on task. Brainstorm refinements to the system. Clarify ideas. Take initiative when their partner is stuck, thus lowering frustration. Hold each other accountable to the team's practices. Pairing

the paper on my lap. Slowly

Always look like you know where you're going, even when you don't.

When you're part of the pioneering effort, there's a focusing of an individual's concentration and level of attention that is at the exclusion of a lot of other things. It's kind of gun-barrel vision.

To let myself be, naked under the sun. To create internal silence. I have pursued this goal through all of life's twists and turns, almost like an idée fixe. This is the small and alarming idea that stands out in the midst of all other ideas and raises the volume of psychic noise, which is already quite considerable.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Don't think about making life better for other people who don't even deserve you, rather, focus on making your life the best, for yourself and those who love you.

Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go. "Energy follows attention" means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.

The work is with me when I wake up in the morning it is with me while I eat my breakfast in bed and run through the newspaper, while I shave and bathe and dress.

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Forewarned is not forearmed. Sometimes you spend so much effort looking for the track that you know is there, that you miss the other one that you didn't know about.

He can't keep this up forever, Joanne. Stop fucking around." Did other people have little voices in their heads that said things like that?

As a contemplative man I am an arrant realist, so that I am capable of desiring nothing from all the things that present themselves to me, and of wishing nothing added to them. I make no sort of distinction among objects beyond whether they interest me or not.42

The training consists: first of all in systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness.

But in the second case the subject is and remains the centre of every interest.

two sharp brown eyes surveyed the room like drive-by shooters.