Quotes About Concentration

The true exceptional performer is on super pilot. Every single sense, every fiber of his body is brought together in what he is doing.

That was what he got for lowering his guard and going off into a dream for a moment.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

This is, I think, what holiness is: the natural world, where every moment is full of the passion to keep moving. Inside every mind there's a hermit's cave full of light, full of snow, full of concentration. I've knelt there, and so have you, hanging on to what you love, to what is lovely. Mary Oliver, At the Lake

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself. Who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work - who is thus responsible to the work.

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.

Non v'è contributo migliore di un fermo proposito per tranquillizzare la mente, di un obiettivo, cioè, su cui l'anima fissi il suo sguardo intellettivo.

pues no hay nada mejor para tranquilizar la mente que un propósito constante, un punto donde el alma pueda fijar la mirada de su intelecto.

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

Demanding immediate results is an aspect of unsteadiness of mind or laziness.

It was a good brain, but it had only two modes—fog and frenzy.

Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing.

He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one's task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute.

these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

Breath is the king of mind.

Meditation is oneness, when there is no longer time, sex, or country. The moment when, after you have concentrated on doing a pose (or anything else) perfectly, you hold it and then forget everything, not because you want to forget but because you are concentrated: this is meditation.

As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward.

Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they're teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools.

the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors

Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of Bam (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with butyric - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see.

Political power, too, is concentrated within the top 20 percent, since its members are far more likely than the poor—or even the middle class—to discern the all-too-tiny distinctions between candidates that can make it seem worthwhile to contribute, participate, and vote.

No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.

You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but only of cutting and killing your enemy.