Quotes About Focus

When I have a mission, it gives me something to focus on.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. (The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101)

Claudia began her studies never doubting that she could become an authority that morning. She had neither pencil nor paper to make notes. And she knew she wouldn't have a lot of time to read. So she decided that she would simply remember everything, absolutely everything she read. Her net profit, therefore, would be as great as that of someone who read a great deal but remembered very little.

It's like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way

If you really want to be a witch, nothing you have to do will seem like too much. If you don't really want to be a witch, everything will seem like too much.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.

when you go over it, cut out everything you can. The main thing is to know what to leave out. The way you tell whether you're going good is by what you can throw away.

Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.

The foundation of greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment, instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.

Let me say it again: the present moment is all you ever have.

When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you are doing, you become stressed.

Just as the dog loves to chew bones, the human mind loves its problems.

Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.

you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.

A moment of danger can bring about a temporary cessation of the stream of thinking and thus give you a taste of what it means to be present, alert, aware.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn't a problem. The mind didn't have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

When you want to arrive at your goal more than you want to be doing what you're doing, you become stressed.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.

Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention.This is surrendered action — empowered action.

Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.