Quotes about concentration
page 8

“They will send their sinister army armed to the teeth to fight us, assaulting the working class, the peasants and popular masses, spreading their sinister claws. They will try to encircle, isolate, crush and wipe us out. But we are the future, the strength, and history. Comrades, revolution and counterrevolution are also contending forces in our country. They are two parts of a unity of opposites in constant struggle. The reactionaries are armed and concentrated, defending the metropolis and capitals. We are rooted in the countryside, in small villages, with the masses, especially with the poor peasants, with the force of the people, among their disorganized force in order to organize it into a powerful army. But this will not be easy.”

Abimael Guzmán (1934–2021) Peruvian communist

Interview with Chairman Gonzalo

People, History, Future, Fight

“To cut off concepts means to let our mental fabrications disband, to let our trains of thought disband. We sit in meditation, making the body and mind quiet. When the body is still, the mind stays with the stillness. When the heart is at peace, the mind stays with the peace. Concentration develops. The mind comes up to the forefront. Mental fabrications disappear, but the mind is still there. Goodness is still there. In nibbāna, nothing disappears anywhere or gets annihilated, except for unawareness.”

Ajahn Lee (1907–1961)

Inner Strength (1956), as translated from the Thai by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

Making love, Peace, Heart, Training

“What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

World, Exercises, Country

“Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, p. 15

Men, Freedom

“To begin with, the new conquerors and rulers…were of a different faith (Islam) from that of their predecessors… their principal achievements lay in a great systematization of agrarian exploitation and an immense concentration of the resources so obtained.”

Irfan Habib (1931) Left Leaning Historian

Quoted from Sandhy, Jain, The denial of history https://web.archive.org/web/20100925004852/http://bharatvani.org/indology/IrfanHabib-denial.html

Faith

“The skills I had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details, they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn the one while doing the other. So it was a big struggle, actually. It took me years.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On adjusting to film writing in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-tsitsi-dangarembga/ in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

Books, Learning

“Poetry was a meeting of mind and heart, I felt at one with poetry itself. I like the concentrated language, the play with form, and the way you can muck around with words in a way that you can’t in a novel. Poetry allows you to be intense, because to some degree people expect it.”

Daljit Nagra (1966) British poet, teacher and broadcaster

On how he views poetry in “Daljit Nagra” https://www.aestheticamagazine.com/daljit-nagra/ in Aesthetica

People, Way, Heart

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Why Socialism? (1949)

People, Education, Making love, Intelligence

“The Effect of Meditation. Remember also that every one who meditates upon the Master makes a definite connection with him, which shows itself to clairvoyant vision as a kind of line of light. The Master always subconsciously feels the impinging of such a line, and sends out in response a steady stream of magnetism which continues to play long after the meditation is over. The methodical practice of such meditation and concentration is thus of the utmost help to the aspirant, and regularity is one of the most important factors in producing the result. It should be undertaken daily at the same hour, and we should steadily persevere with it, even though no obvious effect may be produced. When no result appears we must be especially careful to avoid depression, because that makes it more difficult for a Master’s influence to act upon us, and it also shows that we are thinking of ourselves more than of him.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch.4

Making love, Feeling, Thinking, Light

“There are some of our own people who still think that the Communists are the left wing of the Socialist movement. They are not. The Socialist movement was a movement for freedom in its widest sense. From the point of view of freedom, Communists are on the extreme right—more reactionary than some of the old tyrannies which we knew in the past. What is the thing for which we fight, for which the men with whom we feel the stir of sympathy throughout the ages have fought? Freedom. But that fight changes from age to age and the freedom that some men fought for may turn out to be tyranny. Communists, concentrating solely on the economic aspects of freedom…have produced the ghastly travesty of Socialism in the lands behind the iron curtain.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Glasgow (10 April 1949), quoted in The Times (11 April 1949), p. 4
Prime Minister

Men, People, Age, Feeling

“During the war we had to stop producing the everyday things which we need in peacetime. We had to concentrate on war production and the bare necessities of existence. The natural result is that to-day we are short of the things which we need. … You may ask why cannot we get what we want from abroad? The answer is that we can only get it if we can pay for it. Before the war many of the things which we got from abroad—food and raw material—were paid for by the interest on foreign investments, and by services rendered by us to people in other countries. During the war we had to sell our foreign investments to pay for the arms, food, and other things we needed. Apart from any temporary relief we may get by loans from our friends across the Atlantic, we can only buy from abroad now if we can pay by exporting goods or rendering services.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (3 March 1946), quoted in The Times (4 March 1946), p. 4
Prime Minister

War, People, Food, Nature

“Please concentrate on how the system is governed.”

Fredric Brown (1906–1972) American novelist, short story author

Crag let his mind think about the two parties—both equally crooked and corrupt—that ran the planets between them, mostly by cynical horse trading methods that betrayed the common people on both sides. The Guilds and the Syndicates—popularly known as the Guilds and the Gildeds—one purporting to represent capital and the other purporting to represent labor, but actually betraying it at every opportunity. Both parties getting together to rig elections so they might win alternately and preserve an outward appearance of a balance of power and a democratic government. Justice, if any, obtainable only by bribery. Objectors or would-be reformers—and there weren’t many of either—eliminated by the hired thugs and assassins both parties used. Strict censorship of newspapers, radio and television, extending even to novels lest a writer attempt to slip in a phrase that might imply that the government under which he lived was less than perfect.
Source: Short fiction, Gateway to Glory (1950), pp. 610-611

“The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all… the most likely scenarios…are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean… Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down…”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out Food-system collapse, sea-level rise, disease...Is it Too Late?, Rolling Stone by Bill McKibbon https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/, (9 April Other Bill McKibben Quotes, 2019) 2019

Death, Way, Thinking, Winter

“Favorable conditions for establishing a permanent camp in guerrilla warfare are inverse to the degree of productive development of a place… because everything that is favorable to human life, communications, urban and semi-urban concentrations of large numbers of people, land easily worked by machine, all these place the guerrilla fighter in a disadvantageous situation.”

Ernesto Che Guevara book Guerrilla Warfare

Source: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Ch. I: 5. Warfare on Unfavorable Ground

Life, People, Communication

“The powers of the mind should be concentrated and the mind turned back upon itself; as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will the concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Secret, Sun

“An academic debate on any subject should concentrate on the pros and cons of the arguments presented by the two (or more) opposing sides in the debate; it should be conducted in an open and sincere atmosphere; and the natural desire (not academically wrong in itself) to win the debate should not be allowed to overpower the academic desire to arrive at the truth… And an academic debate cannot be won by the simple expedient of name-calling and label-sticking, and consequent disqualification of the opposing side from even taking part in the debate.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

Truth, Nature, Parting, Sincerity

“First he must gain control over his thoughts, the progeny of the restless, unruly mind, hard to curb as the wind. (Bhagavad Gitâ, vi. 34). Steady, daily practice in meditation, in concentration, had begun to reduce this mental rebel to order ere he entered on the probationary Path, and the disciple now works with concentrated energy to complete the task, knowing that the great increase in thought power that will accompany his rapid growth will prove a danger both to others and to himself unless the developing force be thoroughly under his control. Better give a child dynamite as a plaything, than place the creative powers of thought in the hands of the selfish and ambitious.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Selfishness

“As Minister of Economics, Funk accelerated the pace of rearmament and as Reichsbank president banked for the SS the gold teeth fillings of concentration camp victims, probably the most ghoulish collateral in banking history.”

Walther Funk (1890–1960) German economist and politician

Robert H. Jackson

History

“We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Often abbreviated to: Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
Variant translation: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

World, Passion, Parting

“The Divine Existence (Daseyn),—his Existence, I say, which, according to the distinction already laid down, is his (Manifestation and Revelation of himself—is absolute- only through itself, and of necessity, LIGHT:—namely, y the inward and spiritual Light. This Light, left to itself, separates and divides itself into an infinite multiplicity of individual rays; and in this way, in these individual rays, becomes estranged from itself and its | original source. But this same Light may also again concentrate itself from out this separation, and conceive and comprehend itself as One, as that which it is in itself,-the Existence and Revelation of God; remaining indeed, even in this conception, that which it is in its form,-Light; but yet in this condition, and even by means of this very condition, announcing it-to self as having no real Being in itself, but as only the, Existence and Self-Manifestation of God.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Way Towards The Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion 1806, p. 78

God, Way, Light, Self-confidence

“While all these are disturbed and divided by the multifarious objects to which their thoughts must be applied, the Philosopher pursues, in solitary silence and in unbroken concentration of mind, his single and undeviating course towards the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; and that is his daily labour, to which others can only resort at times for rest and refreshment after toil.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Way Towards The Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion 1806, P. 17

Beauty, Silence, Time

“A particular thought is not the same as a concentrated, creative thought, which is actually a feeling of inward-looking calm. The former produces a descriptive and morpho-plastic art, the latter a purely plastic manifestation. It is a question of the universal versus the individual.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Mondrian refers to André Gide's 'Dada', in 'Nouvelle Revue Francaise', 1 April 1920
As quoted by the editors of 'The New Art – The New Life', op. cit. (Intro., note 1), p. 395, note 8
1920's

Art, Feeling, Question, Universe

“All screws of a given pitch belonging to a system of the third order are the generators of a certain hyperboloid. There is… a different hyperboloid for each pitch. …all these hyperboloids are concentric.”

Robert Stawell Ball (1840–1913) Irish astronomer

A Treatise on the Theory of Screws https://books.google.com/books?id=ECZ-MkhTdvkC 1900 p. 173

“That man always made it a point to speak German, although he spoke English well enough. That was because he imitated Hitler to the last degree. He would say that his reason for speaking German instead of English during conferences with English-speaking representatives was that he wanted to concentrate on the subject in hand, and not on the language. Ribbentrop was a complete imitator of Hitler - even to the design of his cap. Originally he had a nice cap, but then he imitated the stationmaster type of cap preferred by Hitler.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) German general

Paul O. Schmidt to Leon Goldensohn, March 13, 1946.

“This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction… The things on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love. Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts. I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all. I have no idea what I am going to say. I am going to be silent a minute, and then I will say something…”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

'O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.'
Closing statements and prayer from an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975); quoted in Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master : The Essential Writings (1992), p. 237.

Love, Making love, Idea, Heart

“I think I’ve gone through quite an ordinary series of steps in life. I began as most children began, with God and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny all being about the same thing. Then I went through the things that I think sensitive people go through, wrestling with the thoughts of Jesus—did he shit? Did he screw? I began to dare to believe that God wasn’t some white beard. I began to look upon the miseries of the human race and to think God was not as simple as my mother said. As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God, so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place. … My own feeling is that relation to God as a person is a petty, superstitious approach to the All, the infinite.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

As quoted in God & (1975) by Terrance A. Sweeney

Life, God, Children, People

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world: no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Attributed in Shadow Kings (2005) by Mark Hill, p. 91; This and similar remarks are presented on the internet and elsewhere as an expression of regret for creating the Federal Reserve. The quotation appears to be fabricated from out-of-context remarks Wilson made on separate occasions: I have ruined my country. Attributed by Curtis Dall in FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, regarding Wilson's break with Edward M. House: "Wilson … evidenced similar remorse as he approached his end. Finally he said, 'I am a most unhappy man. Unwittingly I have ruined my country.'" A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.… "Monopoly, Or Opportunity?" (1912), criticizing the credit situation before the Federal Reserve was created, in The New Freedom (1913), p. 185 We have come to be one of the worst ruled… Governments…. "Benevolence, Or Justice?" (1912), also in The New Freedom (1913), p. 201 The quotation has been analyzed in Andrew Leonard (2007-12-21), " The Unhappiness of Woodrow Wilson https://www.salon.com/2007/12/21/woodrow_wilson_federal_reserve/" Salon: I can tell you categorically that this is not a statement of regret for having created the Federal Reserve. Wilson never had any regrets for having done that. It was an accomplishment in which he took great pride. John M. Cooper, professor of history and author of several books on Wilson, as quoted by Andrew Leonard Misattributed

Men, World, Country

“Such a perilous concentration of demons would create chaos all around it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

"War gathers on these borders," said Ista. "A greater concentration of chaos I can hardly imagine."

p. 281
Paladin of Souls (2003)

“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Exercises, Effort, Drawing, Self-confidence

“The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.
But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004)
2000s

People, Making love, Idea, Problem

“Beyond our normal twenty-year outlook period, we recently attempted a forecast of the CO2 [carbon dioxide] build-up. We assumed different growth rates at different times, but with an average growth rate in fossil fuel use of about one percent per year starting today, our estimate is that the doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels might occur sometime late in the 21st century. That includes the impact of a synfuels industry. Assuming the greenhouse effect occurs, rising CO2 concentrations may begin to induce climactic changes around the middle of the 21st century.”

Edward E. David Jr. (1925–2017) American engineer

Keynote address at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory on the Palisades, New York campus of Columbia University (October 26, 1982) ( Inventing the Future: Energy and the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect", October 26, 1982, December 22, 2018, Exxon, w:Edward E. David Jr., Edward E., David Jr. http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/inventing-future-energy-co2-greenhouse-effect/,)

Change, Time

“The coronavirus has starkly revealed what most of us already knew: The concentration of wealth in America has created a health care system in which the wealthy can buy care others can’t. It’s also created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail... The system is rigged. But we can fix it... The great divide in American politics isn’t between right and left. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none. Forget politics as you’ve come to see it – as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy....”

Robert B. Reich (1946) American political economist

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-system-is-rigged-but-we-can-fix-it/, Alternet, 24 March 2020

Children, Health, Education, Justice

“Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Chronicles of Dissent, December 13, 1989 https://web.archive.org/web/20000829081348/http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/db-8912.html Quotes 1960s–1980s, 1980s

“Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [Kierkegaard] pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or the clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

The Oddest Prophet – Søren Kierkegaard by Malcolm Muggeridge

God, Fate, Hope, Exercises

“No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Books Within Books (1914) And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

Self-confidence

“Going to Bits. This phrase me to day and is indeed the one I have been looking for; not tragic, not mortal disintegration; only a central weakness which prevents me from concentrating or settling down I have so wanted to write and write ahead. The phrase "obligatory creation" has haunted me. I have so wanted to get out of my morning bath promptly: have decided to do so beforehand, and have then lain in it as usual and watched myself not getting out. It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap. I can't clear anything up yet interrupt a 'good read' in order to clear up. I hope tomorrow to copy out a piece of someone else's prose: it is the best device known to me for taking one out of inself, Plunge into anothers minutiae.'”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

31-1-61

p. 224
Commonplace Book (1985)

Hope, Reading

“We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to "win the hearts and minds of the people" by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the "truth" of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. … I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" an address at the University of Kentucky (10 February 1968) http://books.google.com/books?id=-hHNuLumg8wC&pg=PA68 The Long-Legged House (1969)

War, People, Truth, Peace

“The mind can be trained to steadiness through those forms of concentration which have relation to the sense perceptions.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect : a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Sense, Relation ships, Training

“The obstacles to soul cognition are bodily disability, mental inertia, wrong questioning, carelessness, laziness, lack of dispassion, erroneous perception, inability to achieve concentration, failure to hold the meditative attitude when achieved.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect : a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Soul, Failure, Question

“Seven Beauties was a film that nobody wanted to make, because it talks about a concentration camp. It is a true story. I managed to convince Lina [Wertmüller] to make it and it has been nominated for four Oscars.”

Giancarlo Giannini (1942) Italian actor, voice actor, director and screenwriter

Original: (it) Pasqualino Settebellezze era un film che non voleva far nessuno, perché parla di un campo di concentramento. È una storia vera. Sono riuscito a convincere Lina [Wertmüller] a farlo e ha avuto quattro candidature all'Oscar. From the interview by Silvia Bizio "Il cinema è morto? Me lo diceva già Fellini" https://rep.repubblica.it/pwa/intervista/2019/02/15/news/giancarlo_giannini-219224198/?refresh_ce , Rep.repubblica.it, (February 15 2019). https://rep.repubblica.it/pwa/intervista/2019/02/15/news/giancarlo_giannini-219224198/?refresh_ce

Making love, Beauty

“Governments can be democratic or not, more or less corrupt, but they will still pursue the same basic goals, and they will still be controlled by an elite. Government by its very nature concentrates power and excludes people from making decisions over their own lives.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 4. The Color Revolutions

People, Making love, Nature, Decision

“The mind can be trained to steadiness through those forms of concentration which have relation to the sense perceptions.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

Sense, Relation ships, Training

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

Soul, Failure, Question

“Today in Germany the winner of the last Nobel peace prize is considered a traitor, and to attend any peace meeting would make one a candidate for a concentration camp. Today in Italy there is only one morality: the power and glory of Italy. Today in Russia all children are brought up to despise and hate ‘the class enemy.’”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 35

Hate, Children, Making love, Peace

“[W]e live... in the pockets of reducibility. ...I should have realized [that] very many years ago, but didn't... [I]t could very well be that everything about the world is computationally irreducible and completely unpredictable, but... in our experience of the world there is at least some amount of prediction we can make. ...[T]hat's because we have ...chosen a slice of ...how to think about the universe, in which we can... sample a certain amount of computational reducibility, and that's... where we exist. ...It may not be the whole story about how the universe is, but it is that part of the universe that we care about and ...operate in. ...In science, that's been ...a very special case ...science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this computational reducibility... The motion of the planets can be ...predicted. The... weather is much harder to predict. ...[S]cience has tended to concentrate itself on places where its methods have allowed successful prediction.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

World, Making love, Thinking, Universe

“Achieving strategic clarity is hard. It takes asking tough questions about tradeoffs, deep concentration to get to the very essence of the issues and real courage to cut off competing priorities. It is worth the effort because with real clarity, people, teams and organizations can fully mobilize, break through to the next level and achieve something truly great.”

Greg McKeown (author) book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Journal Articles

People, Courage, Question, Effort

“It concentrates the mind wonderfully knowing that this [life] is all we can expect.”

Bernard MacLaverty (1942) Irish writer

Short story, "The break", p.25
Short Stories, The Great Profundo and Other Stories (1987)

Life

“Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015), p. 47

World, Communication, Nature, Problem

“The main task of socialism to-day is to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of either industrial management or the state bureaucracy—in brief, to distribute responsibility and so to enlarge freedom of choice.”

Richard Crossman (1907–1974) British Member of Parliament

‘Introduction’, New Fabian Essays (1952), p. 27

Freedom

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Dreams, Past, Future, Motivational

“In decades to come ventricular catheterization performed to measure hormone concentrations will become as routine as the measurement of lumbar 'pressure' is today.”

Richard Bergland neuroscientist

The Fabric of Mind (1985)

“If time can be reversed, I would concentrate on telling stories from my great grannies -Edy kasawuli”

Edykasawuli7

Time

“Whenever the heart is in love, the mind become confused about what to do. Even concentration become a heavy burden.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Love, Heart

“Our minds must be capable of concentrating and living in the present moment, rather than always seeking for the past events that cannot be proven to be true.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Past

“Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Attributed to Jefferson in speeches by FDR http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/campaign-address/ and JFK, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/pittsburgh-pa-19470603 but actually a quote about Jefferson by Charles A. Beard in 1936. https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/widespread-poverty-and-concentrated-wealth-spurious-quotation Misattributed

Democracy, Wealth

“I always keep four or five books on my bed table, and each night I read a little of each; I guess I can't concentrate on any one at a time. But I always finish them.”

Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973) Romanian American actor

Source: Op. cit., p. 278

Books, Time, Reading, Night

“Prolonged involvement with Parliament has in the end convinced me that the customary concentration on it as the centre of public affairs, however traditional it may be, is entirely misleading. This is a message, it seems to me, that needs to be absorbed into the general history of England.”

Geoffrey Elton (1921–1994) historian

Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (1986)

History

“I don’t think anyone who wants to succeed—male or female—should concentrate on hurdles because you will find them if you are looking for them, and I have been just too busy to spend time looking for obstacles.”

Linah Mohohlo (1952–2021) Botswana banker

Source: "In On the Ground Floor" (December 2004)

Business, Thinking, Time

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book II, 5

Justice

“There, where the mind concentrates the positive frequency of its thoughts, vitality is born.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Là, dove la mente concentra la frequenza positiva dei suoi pensieri, nasce vitalità.
Source: prevale.net

“Just like two pieces of wood can be rubbed together to produce fire and the same fire later consumes them both, intellect and concentration support the contemplative meditation. But when the fire of insight arises, it consumes both intellect and concentration, giving way to pristine awareness.”

Om Swami (1979) Indian mystic

A Million Thoughts (2016)

Way, Support

“Leave aside craving for other than God: anything else is pseudo thought. Except the Real One, all things are perishable. Each instant concentrate on the Real; undoubtedly this is the committed way.”

Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901) 19th-century sufi Punjabi poet of the punjab , polyglot, scholar and writer

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 299

God, Way

“After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that lead to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Truth, Literature, Cry, Forgetting

“Eugenics is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) form of government was amongst the first to put the full force of its government to conduct compulsory health initiatives. It is by no coincidence that the Dachau concentration camp used its slave-labor to run the largest organic produce farm of the era.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

Health

“Isolation is an excellent ally for concentration and realization during the creative process of one's ideas.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: L'isolamento è un ottimo alleato per la concentrazione e la realizzazione durante il processo creativo delle proprie idee.
Original: prevale.net

Idea

“When every resource and mental energy are oriented towards a single objective, extreme concentration model actions, making the finish line inevitable.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Quando ogni risorsa ed energia mentale sono orientate verso un unico obiettivo, l'estrema concentrazione modella le azioni, rendendo il traguardo inevitabile.
Source: prevale.net

“Turning difficulties into allies by devising solutions it means not to suffer events, but to manage them, training mental flexibility and concentrating only on what you can control.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Trasformare le difficoltà in alleate ideando soluzioni significa non subire gli eventi, ma gestirli, allenando la flessibilità mentale e concentrandosi solo su ciò che si può controllare.
Source: prevale.net

Suffering, Training

Quotes about concentration page 8

Quotes about concentration
page 8