Quotes About Focus

I need no distraction, Russell," he said curtly. "I believe I have already told you that a mind which cannot control its body's emotional reactions is no mind worth having.

The matches also came into focus: a cheap, bright label, in French. I picked up the box, slid it open, my nose stung by the smell of sulphur. Four matches. I took one, scraped it into life, held it to the oil lamp. A spot of warmth entered the room.

Many writers, good writers who ought to know better, focus so tightly on the structure demanded by a crime story that they lose track of the fact that they are writing a novel. Accusations of both sensationalism and trivialisation are, alas, often justified.

One must know a great many unimportant things in order to know those few things which are important.

When I decided in my mid-fifties to return to a hobby I'd abandoned twenty years earlier, I didn't know what sort of a collector I'd be. As a boy I'd started out collecting everything, then narrowed my focus to British Empire—specifically, to the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania. In my mid-twenties I'd begun collecting Benelux as well, and in my mid-thirties, when my first marriage ended, I sold everything.

if you intend to try and work, not to sit under the Tree of Idleness.

I can't wait for the day I learn to live in the now!

Chess is a sad waste of brains.

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.

When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?

No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.

Chess is too difficult to be a game and not serious enough to be a science or an art.

You know, there's such a very thin dividing line between inspiration and obsession that sometimes it's very hard to decide which side we're really on.

Private practice and marriage - those twin extinguishers of science.

A busy life is a wasted life.

In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.

There is no future. There is only now, a continuous now. We have become so wrapped up in the past and the future that we don't see the continuous now. There is no future. It is an idea that you have.

Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought."

If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.

It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit of life.

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.