Attention Quotes

The opposite of busy in today's world is sustained, focused attention. It is deep engagement in activities that really matter to us, or in conversations with those we care about.

~ Tony Crabbe

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

~ Virginia Woolf

Where your attention goes, your time goes

~ Idowu Koyenikan

Concentration is a powerful force, it is the mark of seriousness that attracts certain energies to complete your half-done work.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school. “Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?” the students asked. “Doctors,” Sophia said, “need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation.” Then she opened a canister. The putrid smell quickly moved through the classroom. Sophia stuck a finger in the jar, pulled it up, and then licked it. She passed the jar around encouraging each doctor in training to do the same. Each did, and though many felt nauseas, no one got sick. “You all have very strong stomachs,” she said. “But your powers of observation need some work.” “What do you mean?” they asked. “We did just what you did.” “There is one difference,” she replied. “The finger I dipped in the jar was not the finger I licked.

~ David W. Jones

I wonder at times if we're not all blind. It just seems there are an abundance of books unread, paint strokes not admired, and performances unattended. So much attention painstakingly sought and not given.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Mother nature changes her looks for the same reason any woman changes her looks—to be noticed.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Each cherry took about three seconds to eat. Three seconds to eat, but at least five years in the making. It seemed unfair to the hard-working cherry tree. The least I could do was to devote my attention to the cherry in those three seconds, really appreciate the tartness of the skin and the faint crunching sound when I bite down. I guess it's called mindfulness. Or being in the moment, or making the mundane sacred. Whatever it is, I'm doing it more. Like the ridiculously extended thank-you list for my hummus, the fruit taboo made me more aware of the whole cherry process, the seed, the soil, the five years of watering and waiting. That's the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.

~ A.j. Jacobs

He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I'll date you, love...not you and your iPad. I can't feel plastic palm play; I'm live like Memorex.

~ T.f. Hodge

Wherever you are, be there. If you can be fully present now, you’ll know what it means to live.

~ Steve Goodier

How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention.

~ Joyce Rachelle

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

~ Tim Wu

What did you say, Gram? About there being no church out here? I said that the sky was the roof of my cathedral and the desert was its floor and any time I paid attention, I could feel a higher power all around me.

~ Terri Farley

Worship and spiritual hunger make you so attractive to God that your circumstances cease to matter anymore. He will move heaven and earth to find a worshiper. When you begin to worship with all your being and desire, your heart turns Him toward you. You capture His attention and attracts His affection.

~ Tommy Tenney

There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.

~ Charles Stross

A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.

~ Criss Jami

Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it's exotic, the jewel in the crown.

~ Sherry Turkle

The most valuable commodity of the 21st century will be undivided attention.

~ Phil Cooke

People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.

~ Tom Clancy

Undying love, attention and sacrifice is an essential fuel for relations

~ Alok Jagawat

Your Sacrifices Create The Run Way For Your Blessings, It Has To Be A Sacrifice From You To Attract God's Attention

~ Jaachynma N.e. Agu

It is extremely difficult to obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak to them of themselves. They do not attend to the things said to them, because they are always fully engrossed with the things they are doing. For indeed few men are idle in democratic nations; life is passed in the midst of noise and excitement, and men are so engaged in acting that little remains to them for thinking. I would especially remark that they are not only employed, but that they are passionately devoted to their employments. They are always in action, and each of their actions absorbs their faculties: the zeal which they display in business puts out the enthusiasm they might otherwise entertain for idea.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

There are many causes for the increasing concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, but let us throw one more into the mix: the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.

~ Matthew B. Crawford

Somewhere within you is a huge supply of happiness, always there, patiently waiting for you to reach out and grab it. It’s yours for the asking. And you ask by giving it your attention.

~ Elle Sommer

Mistakes Are Life's Lectures You Didn't Plan To Attend But Situations Or People Made You Attend Them....Pay Attention And Learn From Them

~ Jaachynma N.e. Agu

They were almost never alone, and now that they almost-practically were, he felt kind of frantic for her attention.

~ Rainbow Rowell

Zeke's snort sounded suspiciously like laughter. Allie you're a beautiful, exotic-looking vampire girl with a katana. Trust me, if anyone is going to attract attention, it's not going to be me.

~ Julie Kagawa

The attention was flattering. For the first five minutes. Now I know how poems feel.

~ Margaret Edson

Humans don’t make sense.”“If you’re only now learning that,” Kaladin said, “then you haven’t been paying attention.

~ Brandon Sanderson

At school, everything feels weird. No one looks at me or pays attention to me, no one says hi, no one asks how I am feeling, and everyone is so quite. It’s like I don’t even exist.

~ Abraham M. Alghanem

There was nothing so special about First Class, apart from the amount of uncalled for, almost disturbing, attention I got from the various six-feet tall heavily made up air hostesses, that I would come back for more given the steep price tag.

~ Vann Chow

Shift your attention, and your emotion shifts. Shift your emotion, and your attention shifts.

~ Frederick Dodson

Trying to be offensive for the sole purpose of being offensive should always deem one the least offensive of offenders.

~ Criss Jami

I can't solve any problems. All I can do is try to make sure people can't avoid noticing them.

~ Warren Ellis

Remind yourself daily to spend more time being interested then interesting.

~ Jason Jennings

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

~ Alain De Botton

Forrest Gander: Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.

~ Brian Christian

Eyes skip a low-key profile.

~ Toba Beta

When you are in the company of lunatics, behave like a lunatic. When you are in the company of intelligentsias, speak with brilliance...that is how a chameleon behaves, the territory changes it, and it adapts to the changes.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson