Sustained Attention Quotes

Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.

Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.

It’s very difficult to stay alert indefinitely.

There's people who can, like, dive into material for hours and hours and hours and work on one tiny little specific thing without getting bored of it. Learning how to do that was, like, very useful.

The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.

Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life as it is unfolding.

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

I sometimes worry about my short attention span, but not for long.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

I know everyone says attention spans are shorter now, and if you can't get them in the first 20 seconds, you lost them. But I honestly believe if you give someone something worth slowing down to really pay attention to, they will.

What is the difference between attention and inattention? What is attention and what is concentration? ...Attention has no centre.

The ability to focus on a single task for an extended period is a talent that’s underappreciated - especially by extroverts, who continue to exercise an unhealthy hegemony over most workplaces.

Plants respond far better to moderate but consistent care than they do to occasional bouts of heroic intervention.

The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.

A leading difficulty with the average player is that he totally misunderstands what is meant by concentration. He may think he is concentrating hard when he is merely worrying.

Open office plans, cell phones, constant notifications: these are all things that fight against sustained attention on a task. For some people and some tasks, that doesn’t matter. But for a lot of important work, it matters a lot.

The newspapers and magazines, the theaters and the social reform movements, are more and more made for a public which looks only to be entertained and which has lost the power of sustained attention.

I've heard people say that [I have a short attention span]. I don't feel I do, because when I'm interested in something I'll stay in focus as long as it is necessary... If you get off on something I'm not very interested in, it's very easy for me to block it out. It's easy for me to block things out.

The reason I could last for that long a period of being up was because the piece accidentally caught the excitement and adrenaline from, "Ooh this sounds different from usual... Ooh I like that..." That was the energy that kept me up.

Breughel is an example of an artist - I mean, this is true about artists and painters in general, but he is a specific example of an artist whose work contains more than you think it does at first glance. Whose work rewards, sustains attention and looking.

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

The mind is easily distracted; it loses its focus and becomes restless. If it is not directed positively, its power will be diffused.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.