Quotes About Concentration

history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal—that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible.

A person may paint or talk about painting but he cannot do both at the same time.

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

But he wasn't really thinking properly. It was as if the thoughts were chasing each other round and round his head without managing to catch up with each other.

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

For the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body.

In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.

What remains uncertain, rather, is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!

To explode or to implode – said Qfwfq – that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration.

POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment's pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.

Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

The thing I'd like most in the world," I said to her, since at this point I might as well go on talking with her, "is to make clocks run backward." The woman gives some ordinary answer, such as, "You only have to move the hands." "No, with thought, by concentrating until I force time back," I say.

the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance

Ma è difficile di trattenere il proprio pensiero dall'occuparsi di un argomento che troppo c'importa. L'uomo sarebbe un animale più fortunato se sapesse farlo.

You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

I'll make Goyle do lines, it'll kill him, he hates writing," said Ron happily. He lowered his voice to Goyle's low grunt and, screwing up his face in a look of pained concentration, mimed writing in midair. I... must... not... look... like... a... baboon's... backside.

Every time you forced yourself not to think, your thoughts exploded into life with renewed strength.

Thirdly, the breath provides a natural, gently moving target to focus on in your meditation; it grounds you in the here and now. You cannot take a breath for five minutes ago, or for five minutes' time. You can only take a breath for now

Know that the true dharma emerges of itself [during the practice of zazen], clearing away hindrances and distractions.

the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today's work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.

Imagine that after reaching an atmospheric concentration of 450 ppm sometime in the next decade, we immediately stop all carbon dioxide emissions. By the year 3000, neither atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide nor global mean surface temperature would have returned to their pre-industrial baselines, and sea levels would still be rising.