Sermon quotes on focus
Augustine of Hippo
Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.
W.H. Auden
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention-on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God-that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.
G.K. Chesterton
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
Steve Jobs
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.
Conversation with Nike CEO, Mark Parker
Ann Patchett
Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Pablo Picasso
Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
Tony Reinke
Two theaters compete for our gaze: the theater of sin on earth and the theater of glory where Christ is.
Taken from Competing Spectacles by Tony Reinke, © 2019, p,88. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Richard Sennett
Craftsmanship [is] the state of being engaged.
Quoted in Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (New York: Norton, 2019)
Mark Twain
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Ann Voskamp
When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.
One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
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