“As Simone Weil— perhaps the strangest and most unlikely Thoreauvian solitary, outcast, and transcendentalist of all— wrote, echoing Thoreau's sense of awareness: "The authentic and pure values— truth, beauty, and goodness— in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object." Or, more tersely yet: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction. "Attention deficit" is a cultural disorder, a debasement of spirit, before it is an ailment in our children to be treated with Ritalin.”
"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Curtis White 17
American academic 1951Related quotes
Source: The Architecture of Happiness
"A Knight of the Woeful Countenance" in The World of George Orwell (1972) edited by Miriam Gross, p. 167
Quoted in Amnesty International's essay "From Prisoner to President – A Tribute"
Source: The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
“You say that faith is a gift; this is perhaps the most correct thing that can be said about it.”
As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 305.
“By giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.”
[Words to live by: A daily guide to leading an exceptional life, Easwaran, Eknath, w:Eknath Easwaran, 2005, Nilgiri, Tomales, CA, 978-1-58638-016-8] (page 12: comment for Jan. 3 on quote by Shelley) (work originally published 1990)
“Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth, or indeed of any other century.”
"Simone Weil" in The Nation (12 January 1957) http://www.cddc.vt.edu/bps/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm
Context: Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth, or indeed of any other century. I have great sympathy for her, but sympathy is not necessarily congeniality. It would be easier to write of her if I liked what she had to say, which I strongly do not. …I think Simone Weil had both over- and under-equipped herself for the crisis which overwhelmed her — along, we forget, immersed in her tragedy, with all the rest of us. She was almost the perfectly typical passionate, revolutionary, intellectual woman — a frailer, even more highly strung Rosa Luxemburg. … She made up her own revolution out of her vitals, like a spider or silkworm. She could introject all the ill of the world into her own heart, but she could not project herself in sympathy to others. Her letters read like the more distraught signals of John of the Cross in the dark night.