Quotes About Focus

I sometimes think the reason the guild has endured so long is that it serves as a focus for the hatred of the people, drawing it from the Autarch, the exultants, and the army, and even in some degree from the pale cacogens who sometimes visit Urth from the farther stars.

Sometimes when all our attention is thus focused on memory, our eyes, unguided by ourselves, will distinguish from a mass of detail some single object, presenting it with a clarity never achieved by concentration.

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now.

let me remember to pay attention to the ordinary, not just to the extraordinary.

If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.' This is Tarkovsky's aesthetic in a nutshell.

The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term 'awe'.

Arbus would later insist, 'the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture

In the silence, nothing was fragmented. There were no separate strands to gather together, to fumble, to complete for attention. In the silence, all of that fell away, and there was only what was here, and what was to be done.

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

Time drags only when one is thinking fast.

Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

Set me anything to do as a task, and it is inconceivable the desire I have to do something else.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch.

Direction! I know very well what you mean by direction. When there's a bigger maggot than usual in your head you call it 'direction

I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away.

You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that — if I had

The shortest answer is doing.

There's only one chance in two billion that the elevator will get stuck," he would have focused on that one possibility. Remember, the brain is hardwired to search for danger and the negative in order to survive.

What would I have done if the elevator became stuck again? Simple—I would have maintained a sense of calm and focused on how darkness is his friend.