“We create ourselves by how we invest the energy of our attention” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi , Finding Flow
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are” — Jose Ortega y Gasset
“The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention” — Julia Cameron
“If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent” — Isaac Newton
“Somewhere around the place I’ve got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger’s Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting” — Terry Pratchett
“The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real” — Simone Weil
“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” — Henry Miller
“The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity” — Tom Peters
“If one cannot command attention by one’s admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance” — Margery Allingham
“When people bother you in any way, it is because their souls are trying to get your divine attention and your blessing” — Catherine Ponder
“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them” — Susan Sontag
“One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.” — Franklin Thomas
3 Responses
It seems sometimes that a great deal of attention is paid to the trivial, and little attention is paid to the meaningful.
Gerry,
I think a lot of people don’t realize what is meaningful until it is late in their lives. They think it matters how big the car they drive is or how big their house is. Or how big their God or their country is or how much money they have….
The things that really matter are things like having a big heart, and paying attention to what is happening in this moment. If you can pay attention to your world with compassion and love, a lot of problems simply go away.
[…] dear, another book to put on my list. But what a pithy quote! (I got it from a post at Changing Places–thanks, Donna!) In spite of my desire to pay attention to my attention, I often forget how […]