Quotes About Concentration

In other words, with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage.

When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again.

Flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.

when attention is not focused on a goal, the mind typically begins to be filled with disjointed and depressing thoughts.

This fact brings us to the second condition that affects whether an optimal experience will occur or not: an individual's ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible.

concepto del flujo, el estado en el cual las personas se hallan tan involucradas en la actividad que nada más parece importarles;

Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate. People who suffer from attentional disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of life.

without concentration, a complex activity breaks down into chaos.

Athletes know well that to improve performance beyond a certain point they must learn to discipline their minds.

By learning to concentrate, a person acquires control over psychic energy, the basic fuel upon which all thinking depends.

Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and the easier it is to get distracted.

But personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from the expectations that make demands on attention and allows intense concentration on matters that count.

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life.

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.

Puheesi on kuin kärpäsen surinaa korvissani.

If you're not nervous, you're not paying attention.

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

Clarity comes when you unify all the faculties of the mind into a magnificent light of perception. That light is the concentrated force of the mind. It is by that brightness that truth is revealed.

Cuando está demasiado concentrado, el poder engendra tiranía.

Don't think about mistakes you've made in the past. Don't worry about what might happen in the future if this goes wrong. When your blade cuts into the skin, just think about now.

At this point I would like to quote from the sayings of the most recent of the great Indian rishis (or sages)—Sri Ramana Maharshi, who was an authority on occult psychology and all questions pertaining to the human mind: "An average man's mind is filled with countless thoughts, and therefore each individual one is extremely weak. When, in place of these many useless thoughts, there appears only one, it is a power in itself and has a wide influence.

Don't be so poor to the point that you can't afford to pay attention.