#concentration

I am full of fire and passion. I am not ready yet for great concentration and passion. ↗

— Zane Grey

#concentration #fire #full #great #i

My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#prisoner #russian #zek #skepticism

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious. ↗

— Muriel Spark

#composition #concentration #focus #inspiration #writing

I decided to do the maximum to hold onto the lead for as long as possible. That is why I pushed so hard from the beginning. I was at 100 percent concentration. ↗

— Jean Alesi

#concentration #decided #hard #hold #i

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

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

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

Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes ↗

— Azriel Feuerstein

#azriel-feuerstein #holocaust #the-tumbler #men