#attention

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history. ↗

— Robert Hall

#biography #composed #composition #concentrated #delightful

Life is sweet or bitter depending on where your attention is, at that moment. ↗

— George Alexiou

#experience #life #living #experience

Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts,and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject matter reflects he philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,--indeed, rapt--attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#focus #sublime #beauty

Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14) ↗

— Jean-Yves Leloup

#awakening #breath #buddhism #christianity #community

Eden," Cyrus snapped bringing her back to the present. "I have a sword pointed at you. Will you please focus ↗

— Samantha Young

#humor #short-attention-span #humor

May your sleep be your death, and your wakefulness be your heaven. ↗

— Anthony Liccione

#attention #awareness #carefulness #caution #consciousness

If you feel obsessed to prove something to the world, then you'd need world attention to be able to prove it. ↗

— Toba Beta

#attention #life #prove #success #truth

...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention... ↗

— Herbert A. Simon

#information-overload #inspirational #science #inspirational

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false. ↗

— Richard Cecil

#attention #beautiful #best #convinced #dwell

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art. ↗

— Charles Rosen

#also #art #attention #carefully #classical