Best attention & imagination Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“It is generally recognized that creativity requires leisure, an absence of rush, time for the mind and imagination to float and wander and roam, time for the individual to descend into the depths of his or her psyche, to be available to barely audible signals rustling for attention. Long periods of time may pass in which nothing seems to be happening. But we know that kind of space must be created if the mind is to leap out of its accustomed ruts, to part from the mechanical, the known, the familiar, the standard, and generate a leap into the new.”

Source: The Psychology of Romantic Love: Romantic Love in an Anti-Romantic Age

“I've always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of fairie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look. But I couldn't always find them. And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagination that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.”

World Looks Long Stills Moments Eye Spirit Lying Turns Imagination Attention Gone Long Time Shadow Corners Stranger Pay Attention Instant Excess Twilight Spy

Author:Charles de Lint

“The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in “2001: A Space Odyssey,'' but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, “2001'' is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.”

Source: 33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity: Ebert's Essentials

“Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.”

Kind Universe Heaven Imagination Existence Attention Steps Limits Perception Compass

Author:David Hume

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”

Source: Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works

“He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.”

Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson: An essay on the life and genius of Dr. Johnson [by A. Murphy] Poems.- v. 2-4. The rambler.- v. 5. The idler. History of Rasselas, prince of Abissinia.- v. 6-8. The lives of the English poets.- v. 9. Lives of eminent persons. Letters, selected from the collection of Mrs. Piozzi and others. Prayers and meditations.- v. 10. Philological tracts, &c.- v. 11. Miscellaneous tracts, &c. Dedications. Reviews and criticisms. Tales of imagination. The adventurers.-

“We miss the real by lack of attention, and create the unreal by excess of imagination.”

Real Imagination Attention Missing Excess Unreal

Author:Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterised by solid state, the fixed and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of vegetal imagination. (...) This is the truth that the shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth century visionary Hildegard Von Bingen.”