#focus

To live a more balanced life, glance at the past, live in the present, and focus on the future. ↗

— Todd Stocker

#focus #future #past #present #life

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

Information overload (on all levels) is exactly WHY you need an "ignore list". It has never been more important to be able to say "No ↗

— Mani S. Sivasubramanian

#how-to-focus #saying-no #stay-focused #procrastination

...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being. ↗

— Brian Tracy

#frogs #productivity #procrastination

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#file #focus #how-to-write #imagine #quiet

When you try to persistently abolish hatred, at that very moment...you lose focus on love. ↗

— Toba Beta

#focus #hatred #love #love

Sometimes we tend to focus more on the personalities and the conflicts, and it really caricatures the issues. ↗

— Mitchell Reiss

#conflicts #focus #issues #more #personalities

We must shift the energy policy debate in America with an increased focus on alternative and renewable fuels and Congress must pass meaningful alternative fuels and incentive programs to help move the U.S. away from dependence on foreign oil. ↗

— Rick Renzi

#america #away #congress #debate #dependence

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#faith #fears #focus #perspective #suspense

If you really want to focus on something, says Castellanos, the optimum amount of time to spend on it is ninety minutes. "Then change tasks. And watch out for interruptions once you're really concentrating, because it will take you twenty minutes to recover. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#concentration #focus #change