Distraction And Concentration Quotes & Sayings

Apply the blacksmith's homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say - fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears. — Dale Carnegie

Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter. — Philip Yancey

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

Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness". — Philip Zaleski

I didn't want to move or act like a rich man. I wanted to dance in a pair of jeans. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets. — Gene Kelly

It is often mild distraction that moves imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration. Thinking then works by indirection, sauntering in a roundabout way to places it cannot reach directly. — Rebecca Solnit

All great achievements have one thing in common - people with a passion to succeed — Pat Cash

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster. — Ernst Fischer

I think that people who are famous tend to be underdeveloped in their humanity skills. — Diane Keaton

Aiyaaaa," Zheng said softly.
And if that meant "holy shit," I agreed. — Karen Chance

Of those who have commanded battalions and squadrons, only the names remain. The human race has nothing to show for a hundred battles that have been waged. But the great men I speak to you about have prepared pure and lasting pleasures for men yet to be born. A canal lock uniting two seas, a painting by Poussin, a beautiful tragedy, a newly discovered truth-these are things a thousand times more precious than all the annals of the court or all the accounts of military campaigns. You know that, with me, great men come first and heroes last.

I call great men all those who have excelled in creating what is useful or agreeable. The plunderers of the provinces are merely heroes. — Voltaire

Or is it that I think too much? — Steve Martin

I've been dieting my whole life because I have a tremendous appetite. — Kim Cattrall

Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. — Walter Benjamin

Yet we see, on the contrary, that many acts are most successfully carried out when they are not the objects of particularly concentrated attention, and that the mistakes occur just at the point where one is most anxious to be accurate - where a distraction of the necessary attention is therefore surely least permissible. One could then say that this is the effect of the "excitement," but we do not understand why the excitement does not intensify the concentration of attention on the goal that is so much desired. — Sigmund Freud

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after. — T. S. Eliot

No, I didn't imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you. — Franz Kafka

Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it. — Sharon Salzberg

But, nevertheless, if there is even the slightest recognition, liberation is easy. Should you ask why this is so - it is because once the awesome, terrifying and fearful appearances arise, the awareness does not have the luxury of distraction. The awareness is one-pointedly concentrated. — Karma-glin-pa

Meditation is not passive sitting in silence. It is sitting in awareness, free from distraction, and realizing the clear understanding that arises from concentration. — Nhat Hanh