Inattention Quotes

When a girl marries she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one. (Helen Rowland)

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

Amy Tan

The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.

Dean Koontz

I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I'm not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for attention is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress.

Masiela Lusha

(...) The problem is not yours – it is your mind's only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours. (...) Be conscious of yourself, watch your mind, give it your full attention. Don't look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing. Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change, there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behavior. You need not aim at these –you will witness the change all the same. For, what you are now is the result of inattention and what you become will be the fruit of attention.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

Norbert Wiener

There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not remember where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, "His memory is going."

Samuel Johnson

And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose.

Amy Tan

I think now that fate is half shaped by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.

Amy Tan

One moment's inattention, and the long expected death came at last-unexpectedly! In that agonized moment, sprawled helpless upon the uncaring ground, Polletti realized that no preparation for one's own death is possible. Death has had too much experience in catching men off guard, in piercing their attitudes and reducing their poses.

Robert Sheckley

The executive power is better to be trusted when it has no screen. Sir, we have a responsibility in the person of our President; he cannot act improperly, and hide either his negligence or inattention; he cannot roll upon any other person the weight of his criminality; no appointment can take place without his nomination; and he is responsible for every nomination he makes... far from being above the laws, he is amenable to them in his private character as a citizen, and in his public character by impeachment. (James Wilson)

With patient inattention hear him prate.

George Meredith

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

Robert Bresson

Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.

Robert J. Shiller

Although our inattention can contribute to our lack of total well-being, we also have the power to choose positive behaviors and responses. In that choice we change our every experience of life!

Greg Anderson

I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.

Twyla Tharp

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

Norbert Wiener

There are the states of inattention and of attention. When you are completely giving your mind, your heart, your nerves, everything you have, to attend, then the old habits, the mechanical responses, do not enter into it, thought does not come into it at all.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

When you give complete attention there is no recording. It is only when there is not attention, inattention, you record.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is inattention and rare attention and we are trying to bridge the one to the other.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other's need. It all begins with the simple act of attention. (Daniel Goleman)

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

Bharati Mukherjee

Reconstruction was overthrown, not that it ground to an exhausted halt. Indifference and inattention helped to divert resources from Reconstruction, but the real dagger was planted in Reconstruction's back by political insurgency.

Allen C. Guelzo

[B]y what inattention these scurrilously racist Republicans installed the first African-American secretary of state and national security advisor, appointed a black Supreme Court justice, elected the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction, and sent the troops into Little Rock.

Allen C. Guelzo