Concentration Quotes

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“Those who pray for your downfall are concentrating negative thoughts towards you, without taking cognisance of the slippery ground in which they are standing, which could lead to their downfall.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”
― Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

“We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3

“When you fully focus your mind,
you make others attracted to you.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.”
― Peter Redgrove, The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real: Our Uncommon Senses and Their Common Sense

“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“If you really want to focus on something, says Castellanos, the optimum amount of time to spend on it is ninety minutes." Then change tasks. And watch out for interruptions once you're really concentrating, because it will take you twenty minutes to recover.”
― Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

“The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.”
― Arnold Palmer

“INTEREST. Here is the key to the whole thing. If and when you are truly interested in what you are doing, or are about to do, then you will center your attention on it with little or no effort, and almost irrespective of the attendant conditions.”
― Ralph Alfred Habas, The Art of Self-Control

“Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“Turn your actions into concentrated practices.”
― Belsebuub

“When your drive is moving your purpose, focus must hold the wheels else your might miss the way. And do you know what that means? Avoid Crash!!!. Stay focused!”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Just as there’s usually a space or interval between people passing on the street, even if it sometimes seems very small, a space also exists between thoughts. In your meditation, see if you can perceive this gap between thoughts. What is it, and does it belong to the realm of time? If it does not, then it’s unborn and undying, beyond all conditioning, which is a psychological carry-over from the past to the present.

Whatever thoughts or internal conflicts come up—do nothing. Do not try to force them to cease or change. And don’t “do nothing” to still the mind, quiet fears, or resolve conflicts—all of this is doing something. It only leads to more struggling and prevents you from seeing the actual nature of thought and internal conflict. Genuine attention has no motive.

This observation or listening doesn’t involve effort. Effort merely distracts you from what’s taking place in the instant. A kind of concentration exists that’s not forced. We’ve all experienced listening or paying attention to something we truly enjoyed. At that moment, was effort required for concentration to take place?”
― H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

“Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland's farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time." There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him, "Cook said." That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness and the happiness of others.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Dream big!: See your bigger picture!

“Maximize the time you have through hard work, concentration and research”
― Sunday Adelaja

“One does not simply meme revolutions by halves. Even those with the shortest of attention spans could hold their focus for at least 9.81 meters per second squared.”
― Lil Low-Cu$$'t, The Swarm

“As long as you kept running from birth until death, falling down, getting hurt, no matter how many times you suffered defeat, you got up and started running again. Personal happiness came from all the things and people you came across, ran into by chance along the way. Climber's high. Climbing with all your might, concentrating completely on moving up, never being distracted by the meaningless stuff around you.”
― Hideo Yokoyama, Seventeen

“There are plenty of things in life beyond your control, so you have to control those few things that you are able to”
― Frank D. Prestia

“The power of peaceful concentration on positive things is the goal of deep meditation.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Whereas some schools of Buddhism distinguish more sharply between the preparatory practice of concentration and the liberating practice of insight, Zen views concentration and insight as two sides of the same coin: when the mind is cleared, settled, and focused, it naturally attains insight and manifests its innate wisdom.”
― Bret W Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism

“The higher our degree of concentration, the greater the quality of our life.
Vietnamese girls are often told by their mothers that if they concentrate, they will be more beautiful. This is the kind of beauty that comes from dwelling deeply in the present moment. When a young lady moves inattentively, she does not look as fresh or at ease. Her mother may not use these words, but she is encouraging her daughter to practice Right Concentration”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation

“We start the path to the end of suffering, not by trying to drop our clingings immediately, but by learning to cling more strategically. In terms of the feeding analogy, we don’t try to starve the mind. We simply change its diet, weaning it away from junk food in favor of health food, developing inner qualities that will make it so strong that it won’t need to feed ever again. The canon lists these qualities as five:
conviction in the principle of karma—that our happiness depends on our own actions;
persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their stead;
mindfulness;
concentration; and
discernment.
Of these, concentration—at the level of jhāna, or intense absorption— is the strength that the Buddhist tradition most often compares to good, healthy food”
― Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Karma of Questions