Paying Attention Quotes

1. "Not that anyone minds--no one's paying attention to the music. Most of them never really listen to music. Practically no one actually does. Even at concerts people pay good money for, instead of a three-dollar cover charge, they talk through the whole thing. I feel sorry for them, since none of them understand what it's like to have a song just get into your soul and become your whole world. They don't know what it's like when a song changes your life."
Author: Adam Selzer

2. "Good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant. The borderline between good fortune and disaster, between plenitude and paucity, between the warm hearth of love and the cold chamber of loneliness, was a narrow one. We could cross over from one to the other at any moment, as when we stumbled or fell, or simply walked over to the other side because we were paying insufficient attention to where we were."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "Montalbano and Valente seemed not to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars."
Author: Andrea Camilleri

4. "Be attentive, paying close attention to your internal and external needs."
Author: Asa Don Brown

5. "Being a survivor doesn't mean being strong - it's telling people when you need a meal or a ride, company, whatever. It's paying attention to heart wisdom, feelings, not living a role, but having a unique, authentic life, having something to contribute, finding time to love and laugh. All these things are qualities of survivors."
Author: Bernie Siegel

6. "I don't have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness - it's right in front of me if I'm paying attention and practicing gratitude."
Author: Brene Brown

7. "Like faith and hope, trust cannot be self-generated. I cannot simply will myself to trust. What outrageous irony: the one thing that I am responsible for throughout my life I cannot generate. The one thing I need to do I cannot do. But such is the meaning of radical dependence. It consists in theological virtues, in divinely ordained gifts. Why reproach myself for my lack of trust? Why waste time beating myself up for something I cannot affect? What does lie within my power is paying attention to the faithfulness of Jesus. That's what I am asked to do: pay attention to Jesus throughout my journey, remembering his kindnesses (Ps. 103:2)."
Author: Brennan Manning

8. "We are angry about paying the highest income taxes and property taxes in the nation and getting less and less for it. We are angry about our incompetent, dysfunctional government that pays no attention to the desires of the people. We are angry about the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interests and self-dealing that is Albany."
Author: Carl Paladino

9. "One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life."
Author: Caroline Knapp

10. "Funny how a thing like that can be so damned important, but you don't know it's important until an instant later in the big scheme of time. Then you go back and try to retrieve it. You tell yourself it's in there somewhere. But it's really in that no-man's-land of the moment before you woke up and started paying attention to your own life."
Author: Catherine Ryan Hyde

11. "I was playing little league baseball when Bruce Jenner was winning the gold but I don't think I was really paying attention at that time."
Author: Dan O'Brien

12. "A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain."
Author: Daniel Goleman

13. "So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

14. "That's how the universe worked at times: little things - the tiniest things - could catapult you toward a good life, but you had to be open and you had to be paying attention. Love wasn't purely destined, it relied on hiccups of fate - Aimee Mann, someone else's trip to Peru, a black dog."
Author: Davy Rothbart

15. "Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy - well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. -Odd Thomas -Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 30 chapter 4"
Author: Dean Koontz

16. "By the way, in case you weren't paying attention or something, did you catch what Mr. Powell called me? "Young artist." I bet you missed that."
Author: Gary D. Schmidt

17. "When Warren Buffett says the sun shines out of somebody's backside, it's worth paying attention."
Author: Guy Spier

18. "I wasn't paying attention," said Myrtle dramatically. "Peeves upset me so much I came in here and tried to kill myself. Then, of course, I remembered that I'm -- that I'm --" "Already dead," said Ron hopefully. Myrtle gave a tragic sob, rose up in the air, turned over, and dived headfirst into the toilet, splashing water all over them and vanishing from sight, although from the direction of her muffled sobs, she had come to rest somewhere in the U-bend."
Author: J.K. Rowling

19. "I rested my cheek against his back and closed my eyes, breathing in his scent. It reminded me of his apartment, and his sheets, and the way he smelled when he walked around with a towel around his waist. The city blurred past us, and I didn't care how fast he was driving, or how cold the wind was as it whipped across my skin; I wasn't even paying attention to where we were. The only thing I could think about was his body against mine. We had no destination or time frame, and we drove the streets long after they had been abandoned by everyone but us."
Author: Jamie McGuire

20. "I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know."
Author: Javier Marías

21. "Game management is accomplished by staying constantly alert and then reading and reacting to potential problem situations before they materialize. It all boils down to paying attention to details."
Author: Jim Evans

22. "...poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths..."
Author: John Geddes

23. "We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in."
Author: John Holt

24. "Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings."
Author: Jon Kabat Zinn

25. "Is your head bothering you?" Louisa asked. But she wasn't paying much attention. Frederick, her ridiculously fat basset hounds, had spotted a fellow canine in the distance and was yanking on the lead. "Frederick!" she yelped, tripping on a step or two before she found her footing.Frederick stopped, althought it wasn't clear if it was due to Louisa's hold on the lead or outright exhaustion. He let out a hugh sigh, and frankly, Annabel was suprised that he didn't collapse on the ground."I think someone has been sneaking him sausages again," Louisa grumbled.Annabel looked elsewhere."Annabel!""He looked so HUNGERY," Annabel insisted.Louisa motioned toward her dog, whos belly slid along the grass. "THAT looks hungery?""His eyes looked hungery."
Author: Julia Quinn

26. "I know I can't make time slow down, can't hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children's inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming. Now it dawns on me that the only way I can figure out what I'm meant to be doing is to try to understand who I'm meant to be...I will not waste this life, not one hour, not one minute. I will not take for granted the blessing of our being here...I will give thanks..."
Author: Katrina Kenison

27. "I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind qas off chasing rabbits in a thousand directions."
Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

28. "But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it."
Author: Larry Brooks

29. "Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions."
Author: Lorraine Anderson

30. "Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of 'scoldings' and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not makes such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, they they would be only more in love afterward."
Author: Marcel Proust

31. "I could feel him paying attention to me with every inch of his being. He wanted to know me. My skin tightened with the pleasure of it. So I answered."
Author: Martha Southgate

32. "Being relevant simply consists in paying close attention to the point that is being talked about and saying nothing that is not significantly related to it."
Author: Mortimer J. Adler

33. "Every time I would open my mouth to sing, everybody was paying attention to me. It became a habit."
Author: Nana Mouskouri

34. "You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle."
Author: Paulo Coelho

35. "One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but when you let the game flow organically and allow yourself to be fully present. You'll often hear scouts say of a great prospect, "The game comes slow to him." It mean the prospect is skilled and poised enough to let the game unfold in its own time, paying no attention to the angst or urgency or doubt, funnelling all awareness to the athletic task at hand."
Author: R.A. Dickey

36. "I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?"
Author: Richard Russo

37. "I also never would have imagined I'd quote back a church lesson, but when the rest of the crowd stood up to take communion, I found myself saying to Dimitri: "Don't you think that if God can supposedly forgive you, it's kind of egotistical for you not to forgive yourself?""How long have you been waiting to use that line on me?" he asked."Actually, it just came to me. Pretty good, huh? I bet you thought I wasn't paying attention.""You weren't. You never do. You were watching me."
Author: Richelle Mead

38. "But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it."
Author: Rob Sheffield

39. "He shakes his head and his mouth is quirked at one corner. I can't tell if he thinks I am sort of amusing or truly pathetic. It's especially hard to tell because we are both looking resolutely at the teacher so she can't accuse us of not paying attention. We talk out of the sides of our mouths, like gangsters in those old movies my dad likes to watch."
Author: Stephanie Wardrop

40. "Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."
Author: Susan Sontag

41. "I'll expect you and your . . . guy friend in the front row. Paying very close attention.""Wow," I say. "What will you ever do if I get a boyfriend?"
Author: Suzanne Young

42. "Don't blame the hunter if you aren't paying attention enough to spot the traps."
Author: T.T. Escurel

43. "I'm sure Mr da Quirm draws lovely pictures, but I for one would need a little more evidence of his amazing genius before we entrust the world to his...device. Show me one thing he can do that anyone couldn't do, if they had the time.''I have never considered myself a genius,' said Leonard, looking down bashfully and doodling on the paper in front of him.'Well, if I was a genius I think I'd know it-' the Dean began, and then stopped.Absent-mindedly, while barely paying attention to what he was doing, Leonard had drawn a perfect circle."
Author: Terry Pratchett

44. "The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity."
Author: Tom Peters

45. "...if we aren't learning something from a new experience, it's usually because we aren't paying attention. Or we're following the wrong libretto."
Author: Tom Robbins

46. "The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."
Author: Tom Robbins

47. "We have seen from experience that, if we are in the habit of walking regularly on the same road, we are able to think about other things while walking, without paying attention to our steps."
Author: Vinoba Bhave

48. "Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts:1)Artificial censorship2)Limitations of social contact3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs.4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives"
Author: Walter Lippmann

49. "Ken brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. I'd been paying so much attention to Ken, I didn't know what happened during the game. I don't think anyone cared too much what the outcome was after Ken's at bat."Do you know who won?" I asked Cooper, who automatically translated into sign language for Shawn.Shawn laughed his odd laugh and signed something back. He looked at Ken, who had an arm wrapped possessively around my waist.Cooper grinned. "Shawn says it looks like you did, Jordie."
Author: Z.A. Maxfield

50. "In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest."
Author: Zygmunt Bauman

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