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Attention Quotes

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Attention Quotes

“What I love most about playing in front of people has something to do with a certain kind of energy exchange. The attention and appreciation of my audience feeds back into my playing. It really seems as if there is a true and equal give and take between performer and listener, making me aware of how much I depend on my audience. And since the audience is different every night, the music being played will differ too. Every space I performed in has its own magic and spirit.”

“I'm not a big dreamer. I never have been.The only thing I've sort of obviously extracted from the research of dreams is that I don't think there's a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it's up to, obviously, the individual. Obviously, we suppress things, emotions, things during the day - thoughts that we obviously haven't thought through enough, and in that state of sleep when our subconscious or mind just sort of randomly fires off different surreal story structures, and when we wake up we should pay attention to these things.”

“THERE is scarcely any inquiry more curious, or, from its importance, more worthy of attention, than that which traces the causes which practically check the progress of wealth in different countries, and stop it, or make it proceed very slowly, while the power of production remains comparatively undiminished, or at least would furnish the means of a great and abundant increase of produce and population.”

“We live in a supermarket of ideas, faiths, practices, theories, ideologies, and much else besides. Never in human history have there been so many movements and ideas struggling to attract our attention. Added to this, the Western world is swamped by material goods and the Western mind is dominated by the goal of material success. In all this confusion, Zen stands out as a voice of sanity. It represents a different way of seeing the world, one based upon the rediscovery of who we really are and have always been, through revealing to us our true nature.”

“When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing... Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today... to pay partial attention - continuously. It is different from multi-tasking.”

“Just as an earthly garden needs constant attention, so, too, does our spiritual garden. When we first begin our journey of spirituality our garden is filled with all sorts of interesting items--it was not, after all, a fallow place before we sought to investigate what might be there and what we could possibly put in it. Everyone's spiritual garden is different, because each individual is unique.”

“Truth, like beauty, varies its fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literatures of his own age. As the manners of nations vary, new topicks of persuasion become necessary, and new combinations of imagery are produced; and he that can accommodate himself to the reigning taste, may always have readers who perhaps would not have looked upon better performances.”

“Make this decision today. Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.”

“Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”

“I've watched and learnt from DJs and remixers and paid way more attention to how I want my voice to sound. Before, as long as it was loud and in tune it was fine. I've discovered the difference made by various microphones and effects, so each track has a different vocal sound, my voice is woven into everything and it's above everything.”

“Malcolm Fraser, in the marrow of his bones, despised racism. He despised people who discriminated against other people because they were different and in particular because of the colour of their skin, and I don't think there has been a time in Australian politics where there has been more attention to the importance of that value.”

“Great merit or great failings will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world. Examine yourself, why you like such and such people and dislike such and such others; and you will find that those different sentiments proceed from very slight causes.”

“The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping ... 'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.”

“You do not have to have money to attract money, but you cannot feel poor and attract money. The key is, you have to find ways of improving the way you feel from right where you stand before things can begin to change: By softening your attention to the things that are going wrong, and by beginning to tell stories that lean more in the direction of what you want instead of in the direction of what you have got, your vibration will shift; your point of attraction will shift - and you will get different results.”

“You're always getting a perfect vibrational match to what you predominantly give your attention to. But you've got to make the best of it. You've got to vibrate slightly different from where you are if you are going to improve where you are. You can't keep taking score of where your business is or your relationship is or your body is without continuing to create it as it is. To make improvement, you've got to reach for a different thought.”

“If there's a distinction between men and women, I don't pay attention to it. Honestly, I don't see it. I think all of us are part feminine and part masculine. I'm sure sociologists can come up with distinctions about what's different between men and women, but for every example you can give about what a woman does, you can come up with an opposite example of other women who don't do that. Those are more artificial distinctions, I think.”

“I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.”

“People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.”

“The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.”

“Too often little attention is paid to individual talent. instead, education goes on dividing people according to their sex, and putting them in little feminine or masculine pigeonholes ... Girls are shielded and sometimes helped so much that they lose initiative and begin to believe the signs 'Girls don't' and 'Girls can't' which mark their paths... Consequently, it seems almost necessary to evolve different methods of instruction for them when they later take up the same subjects.”

“People stopping you in the street, though, is very different from being hounded by the press, which is the kind of attention that celebrities get, and I'm probably too old for that kind of thing to happen anyway. I think it happens more when you're dating all sorts of different very handsome actors or something. They want gossip and scandal, and they know they're not going to get it from me because I'm too old to be scandalous. Of course, they could read the book - although it's not really a scandalous book.”

“Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.”

“Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.”