Attention Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Aldous Huxley

George Bernard Shaw

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Margery Allingham

Emil Cioran

Robert G. Allen

Konstantin Stanislavski

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Herbert A. Simon

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

Alain de Botton

Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS. S. O. S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE. THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS McCANDLESS. AUGUST?

Christopher McCandless

Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.

Konstantin Stanislavski

A masculine education cannot spare from professional study and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen.

Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

John Singer Sargent

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence — a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities at least one can be a nuisance.

Margery Allingham

Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand.

Robert G. Allen

Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.

Henri Poincaré

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

Nadia Boulanger

My thing was play as hard as you can, don't be stupid, pay attention to details, and have enough guts in the clutch that you're not afraid to make a play.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

The health of the people is of supreme importance. All measures looking to their protection against the spread of contagious diseases and to the increase of our sanitary knowledge for such purposes deserve attention of Congress.

Chester A. Arthur

In any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like. Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot. I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

José Ortega y Gasset