#concentration

The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress. ↗

— Ramana Maharshi

#degree #freedom #freedom from #gauge #measures

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book. ↗

— Margaret Mahy

#book #complex #concentration #different #different sort

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million. ↗

— John Olver

#another #atmosphere #atmospheric #china #co2

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#believe #camp #concentration #disproved #existence

To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver's seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#concentration-camps #nine-sweet-potatoes #world-war-two #change

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. ↗

— Tadeusz Borowski

#death #deception #death

Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration—studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing—are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s. (254) ↗

— Norman Doidge

#concentration #dementia #memory-loss #equality

The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience. ↗

— Peter Redgrove

#eroticism #hypnosis #self #spontaneity #experience

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form. ↗

— Thomas Boswell

#concentration #life #poetry #speech #experience

The purpose of concentration should be well defined. In our routine life it may be for worldly gains and for increasing the knowledge, in moral sense it must be to improve the ethics of our life but in spiritual sense it is knowing one’s self ↗

— Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

#ethics-and-moral-philosophy #meditation #moral #philosophy #spiritual