Quotessence
Home / Authors / Johann Hari
Johann Hari

Johann Hari Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllReadingWorldBritishChanceDepressionPeopleStressThinkingWarAddictionBombsBooksChildrenClassConnectionConnectionsDiesEmergingEmpathyFocus

Famous Johann Hari Quotes

“What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.”

ReadingBooks
Book:Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again
Create image

“The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey--which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans--found that between 2004 and 2017, the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.”

ReadingAttentionFocus
Book:Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again
Create image

“I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It’s a spiral – as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that in turn, made us less likely to read books.”

ReadingBooks
Book:Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again
Create image