164 Attention Quotes

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

Should a person on returning from the city discover his house to be in flames, let him examine well the change which he has received from the chair-carrier before it is too late; for evil never travels alone.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.

A good listener is usually thinking about something else.

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

I think cheesecake helps call attention to you. Then you can follow through and prove yourself.

Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.

I'm always amazed at anyone's interest in what I have to say.

Fifty percent of people want to sleep with me, and the other 50 percent want to kill me.

Don't pay any attention to the critics - don't even ignore them.

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

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention.

Now we have hands-free phones, so you can focus on the thing you're really supposed to be doing ... chances are, if you need both of your hands to do something, your brain should be in on it too.

We usually see only the things we are looking for - so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.

You know you're really famous when there's rumors about you being gay.

Presence is more than just being there.

An actor's a guy, who if you ain't talking about him, ain't listening.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

I ne'er could any luster see In eyes that would not look on me.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

School children and students who love God should never say: 'For my part I like mathematics'; 'I like French'; 'I like Greek.' They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.

'Husbands are like fires - they go out when unattended.'

From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.

How is it possible that stupidity should end our lives when our enemies' cleverest stratagems had not

Each incapable of knowing the others virtue, because like all children they only wanted to be known, and cared little about giving that gift to others

A man walks down the street He says why am I short of attention Got a short little span of attention And woe my nights are so long

Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again - a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.

Hopin you listenin, catch you payin attention/to my ambitions as a ridah

Cause oh they sweat a brother majorly/And I don't know why, your girl keeps paging me

A lot of what acting is, is paying attention.

A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.

Ah, you come to see the others but rarely to see me.

I know, that obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world. I can't tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me ... There must therefore be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is even mysterious to myself.

You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.

On the fifteenth of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, He was splashing... enjoying the jungle's great joys... When Horton the elephant heard a small noise.

A friend of mine gave me a Philip Glass record. I listened to it for five hours before I realized it had a scratch on it.

Il est quelquefois agreable a un mari d'avoir une femme jalouse; il entend toujours parler de ce qu'il aime.

Ce qui fait que si peu de personnes sont agreables dans la conversation, c'est que chacun songe plus a ce qu'il veut dire qu'a ce que les autres disent.

He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.

How did the party go in Portman Square? I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there. And how did Lady Gaster's party go? Juliet was next me and I do not know.

Observation-activity of both eyes and ears.

'Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.'

It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

Everybody wants ta get inta da act!

Send home my long strayed eyes to me, Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.

Before the Barn-Door crowing, The Cock by Hens attended, His Eyes around him throwing, Stands for a while suspended: Then One he singles from the Crew, And cheers the happy Hen; With how do you do, and how do you do, And how do you do again.

I haven't changed my thinking about those guys very much! Even in France, I still have them staking me out and watching our house in the countryside. I don't see the point of guys earning their living by taking photos of me and Vanessa walking our kids to a playground. But I'm trying not to let myself get worked up about it anymore. That just makes them even more money and they know that so some of them try to provoke you that way. So I've stopped playing into their hands. I'm just trying to be a boring family guy so there's no value to taking my photo anymore. (2004)

There have been times when I have deliberately tried to take my life... I think I must have been crying for some attention.

'The one thing I fear for [Kanye] the most is if you keep talking about being the greatest, people eventually are going to want to watch you fail.' - John Mayer (From MTV.com)

No one ever listens to me. I might as well be a Leonard Cohen record.

We had no sooner taken our seats in the railway carriage and the train was beginning to move slowly out of the station when the guard came along the corridor and presented me with my viola! The porter had spotted it, reclining in its case all alone on the platform seat where Lillian and I had been busily engaged in conversation, run along the platform, and thrust it into the hands of the guard through the luggage van window as the train was moving off. Such was my absorption in Lillian that I could even forget the existence of my beloved and precious viola which had meant so much to me for so many years.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (129)

It is better to be looked over than being overlooked.

'Mani Madhava Chakyar was performing sikhinisalabha... Butterflies fly all around. Some of them fell into the fire below. The anguish was reflected in the actor's eyes. Ha! There they come out without a burn! What a relief! They came again. The actor continued the performance. Only his eyes move: The audience was spellbound. They did not know that an hour has passed!' - About his world famous abhinaya of the shloka shikhinisalabha from Subhadradhananjayam.[18]

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent.

A modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

'Oh, look,' she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provencal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.

It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.

With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

When I started my public life, twelve years ago, I understood the media might be interested in what I did. I realized then their attention would inevitably focus on both our private and public lives. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become. Nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner, that's been hard to bear. At the end of this year, when I've completed my diary of official engagements, I will be reducing the extent of the public life I've lead so far.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

I think Ron Paul is probably telling the truth, nobody's listening.

There used to be a time when this country's president could have delivered the same New Year's Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed. Fortunately, that time has passed.

To me! To me!

I like to feel the burn of the audience's eyes when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone

'Lisey?' Amanda asked. Her brow was deeply furrowed. 'I'm sorry,' Lisey said. 'I just kind of...went off there for a second'. 'You often do,' Amanda said. 'I think you got it from Scott. Pay attention, Lisey. I made a little number on each of his magazines and journals and scholarly things. The ones piled over there against the wall.' Lisey nodded as if she knew where this was going. 'I made the numbers in pencil, just light,' Amanda went on. 'Always when you're back was turned or you were somewhere else, because I thought if you saw you might have told me to stop.' 'I wouldnt've.' She took the little notebook which was limp with its owner sweat. 'Eight hundred and forty six! That many!' And she knew the publications running along the wall weren't the sort she herself might read and have in the house, ones like O and Good Housekeeping and Ms., but rather Little Sewanee Review and Glimmer Train and things with incomprehensible names like Piskya. 'Quite a few more than that,' Amanda said, and cocked a thumb at the piles of books and journals. When Lisey really looked at them, she saw that her sister was right. Many more than eight hundred and forty-some. Had to be. 'Almost three thousand in all, and where you'll put them or who'd want them I'm sure I can't say. No, these eight hundred and forty-six is just the number that have pictures of you.'

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