Attentiveness Quotes

“When the shimmer of the past is melting into the presence, spreading a scent of attentiveness and inquiringness, our mind may ask for a new reading of the story of our life. An innocuous flicker from a hazy sequence in our memory lane can affect our current awareness, making us raise questions, throwing new light on our expectations; crafting an airy vision of the future. ("A change of vision" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It is extremely difficult to stay alert & attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness -- the feeling that someone is trying to think about us -- something we want more than praise?”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“True beauty is a warm heart, a kind soul, and an attentive ear.”
― Ken Poirot

“Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We thing we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“The girl was kind in a special way; when you spoke to her, she seemed to stop thinking of whatever she been thinking and listened to you altogether.”
― Ellery Queen, The Player on the Other Side

“When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak, be our silent statement.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“The ability to experience bliss requires the gift of attentive awareness, curiosity, and constant learning. We are ultimately the product of what we want – our personal obsessions – and how we think. Thoughts merge into feelings that determine if we are happy or sad. Feelings can manifest into thoughts that drive our ambitions and guide our personal actions, which enable us to live an intensified life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A car with a small hole in its fuel tank unattended to shall see its fuel draining little by little and it shall only be left in the middle of a long journey! So is life! Mind the small things!”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“This days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another.”
― Ishmael Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow

“[P]eople think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.”
― George Saunders

“Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn't go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son.”
― Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

“...there is no question that precision is difficult to achieve. Imprecision is easier. Imprecision is available in a wide variety of attractice and user-friendly forms: cliches, abstractions and generalizations, jargon, passive constructions, hyperbole, sentimentality, and reassuring absolutes. Imprecision minimizes discomfort and creates a big, soft, hospitable place for all opinions; even the completely vacuous can find a welcome there. So the practice of precision not only requires attentiveness and effort; it may also require the courage to afflict the comfortable and, consequently, tolerate their resentment.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.”
― James Agee

“Each soul must awaken from the aloneness of a private dream world to greet the morning sun, view the sweet earth, apprehend the great silence, and demonstrate an appreciative thanks to everyday of life by living in a rapt state of attentive awareness.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Every time that we consider our past, examine our present environment, and speculate about the future, we engage in mental projection. Contemplation merges into thinking, and thinking unspools into theorizing suppositions. Every act of attentiveness expands our state of awareness. Deductive surmises represent an ongoing process of making applicable connections between theories and facts. Devising working hypothesis represents one of the highest intellectual achievements of humankind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.”
― Ada Limon

“I displayed from my earliest years the greatest sensibility of disposition. I cannot say with what passion I loved every thing even the inanimate objects that surrounded me. I believe that I bore an individual attachment to every tree in our park; every animal that inhabited it knew me and I loved them. Their occasional deaths filled my infant heart with anguish. I cannot number the birds that I have saved during the long and severe winters of that climate; or the hares and rabbits that I have defended from the attacks of our dogs, or have nursed when accidentally wounded.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“...the more students recognize their own uniqueness and particularity, the more they listen.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Įdomu, kiek yra žmonių, kurių aš nesu matęs, nors žiūriu į juos visą gyvenimą.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I was an attentive child; the world seemed like a bewildering place and I wanted all the knowledge I could come by.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“Taking the right action if a challenge arises, responding the right way with the right timing, requires being attentive. Sometimes, the cues about how best to interact with people or a situation are subtle. Sometimes, opportunities dry up very quickly, and you can miss them if you don’t act right away. Being aware of when a shift is happening and remaining flexible helps.”
― Carl Greer, The Necktie and the Jaguar

“Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowan Williams put it, we want our minds to be slack and attentive at the same time, the senses relaxed, open, and alive, the eyes tenderly poised.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen