Up: [[Attention]] Created: 2023-02-19 Updated: 2026-02-10 > [!Orbit] Jose Ortega y Gasset > Tell me what you pay attention to > and I will tell you who you are. > [!Orbit] Lunaea Weatherstone in *Tending Brigid’s Flame* > Living a spiritual and magical life comes down to two simple and profound elements: attention and intention. If you pour yourself a cup of coffee while reading your email and drink it without really tasting it, it will still warm you and give you a lift. If you take a moment to appreciate the beauty of the cup, the scent of the coffee, the pattern of the waft of steam arising from the surface, and the sensation of the liquid as it moves down your throat and becomes part of your body, you are moving in the direction of devotion…. > Now add intention to your attention. Your mundane intention is probably to wake up a bit through the judicious use of caffeine, but you can add a higher intention. Invoke [[Bride]]’s presence as you drink your brew and ask that it awaken your creativity, inspire you with eloquence, or help you focus on the day’s tasks ahead. (p.52) > [!Orbit] Cheri Huber > The quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention. > [!Orbit] Victoria Erickson in *Edge of Wonder* > I’m tired of long-term goals and rules. I want to set intentions instead, breathing and existing in this moment every step of the way. I’ve always written from my body rather than my head, and that’s exactly how I want to make my decisions: not from logic or emotion but from my very core itself. That’s where the real power lies, and also how we begin to free ourselves. (p.117) > [!Orbit] [[Oliver Burkeman]] in *Four Thousand Weeks* > …your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. (p.91) > [!Orbit] Louise De Salvo in *On Moving* > Humble tasks, when they involve acts of attention, become spiritual tasks. > [!Orbit] Sam Harris > What you really have is the quality of your mind in each moment, the freedom of your attention. Take full possession of that right now by relaxing your hold on everything else. > [!Orbit] Pat Wolfe > There is no such thing as not paying attention. The brain is always paying attention to something. > [!Orbit] William James > My experience is what I agree to attend to. > [!Orbit] James Williams (works on philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford) > If we want to do what matters in any domain — any context in life — we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything. > [!Orbit] Elvis Presley > Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same, but you leave ‘em all over everything you do. > [!Orbit] [[Mary Oliver]] > To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. > [!Orbit] [[Mary Oliver]] > Attention is the beginning of devotion. > [!Orbit] [[Mary Oliver]] in *Our World*, something she learned from her partner, Mary Malone Cook > Attention without feeling…is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. (p. 71) > [!Orbit] Henry Miller > The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. > [!Orbit] Lauren Artress > What we nurture in our everyday lives shapes the state of our soul. > [!Orbit] Julia Margaret Cameron > The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention. > [!orbit] Julia Cameron in *The Artist’s Way* > … art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. (p.21) > [!Orbit] Katherine May in *Enchantment* > Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own contouring. (p. 114) > [!Orbit] James Rennie in an 1857 personal journal > It can never be too strongly impressed upon a mind anxious for the acquisition of knowledge that the commonest things with which we are surrounded are deserving of minute and careful attention. > [!Orbit] Grant Faulkner > Our concentration consecrates the world around us; our attentiveness deepens what it regards. > [!Orbit] [[John O’Donohue]] in *Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom* > Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, ‘What did I really see this day?’ (p.61-62) > [!Orbit] R.D. Laing > The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. > [!Orbit] [[Tara Leaver]] > The key thing is to notice what you notice. The more we train ourselves to look out for images, shapes, colours, and whatever else catches our eye, the more we refine our artist eyes and the more our personal style begins to emerge and develop. > [!Orbit] Gary Zukav > We must be conscious of our intentions because who we are and the life we lead is directed and shaped by them. > [!Orbit] Marion Milner in *A Life of One’s Own* > The act of looking was somehow a force in itself which changed my whole being. (p. 156) > [!Orbit] Amy Cowen in *Illustrated Life* Substack > Maybe the magic of a children’s book (is) the ability to bundle the details of a life as a wonder. > [!Orbit] Chelsey Pippin Mizzi in *Tarot for Creativity* > Attention breeds ideation and craft — the more of it you give to the moment you’re in, the more depth, knowledge, experience, and imagination you can bring to your creative expression. (p. 214) > [!Orbit] Sarah Manguso in *Ongoingness: The end of a diary* > I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it. (p. 3) > [!Orbit] [[Oliver Burkeman]] in *Meditations for Mortals* > In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight. (p. 36) > [!Orbit] D.H. Lawrence > An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. > [!Orbit] J.D. McClatchy, poet > Love is the quality of attention we pay to things. > [!Orbit] Iain McGilchrist in *The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world* > Defines attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists.” Then — > The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. > [!Orbit] Iain McGilchrist in *The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world* > Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognize (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being. > [!Orbit] Simone Weil > attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity > [!Orbit] Ian Roberts in *Creative Authenticity* > If you read accounts of enlightened people, you will notice that because they are so open, with so few filters on their perception, everything for them is poetry. Everything is alive, asking for attention. Attention to what? To the divine that hovers beneath the surface of all life. (p. 158) > [!Orbit] Shaun McNiff in *Trust the Process: An artist’s guide to letting go* > Everything depends upon the quality of attention you bring to experience…. I suggest becoming a witness to your life as you live it. (p. 141) > [!Orbit] Philip Kapleau > For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible. > [!Orbit] Henry David Thoreau in *Journal, 1851* > The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Mysterium Coniunctionis* > The attention given to the unconscious has the effect of incubation, a brooding over the slow fire needed in the initial stages of the work; hence the frequent use of the terms *decotio*, diggestion, *putrefactio*, *solutio*. It is really as if attention warmed the unconscious and activated it, thereby breaking down the barriers that separate it from consciousness. (para. 180) > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Black Books* > How little adept we are at living. > We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that the intention is the limitation, the exclusion of life. And how much childish short-sighted egotism lies in an intention. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention. And in that way aim past the light. Howe can we presume to know in advance from where the light will come to us? > [!Orbit] Vincent van Gogh > It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.