Focusing Illusion Quotes

The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times. The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time. During the last ten years we have learned many new facts about happiness. But we have also learned that the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it ~ Daniel Kahneman

The problem isn't a shortage of opportunities; it's a lack of perspective. ~ Tim Fargo

We don't believe other people's experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness. ~ Daniel Gilbert

Arguably the mos intriguing characteristic assessed by the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), a widely used test developed by the University of Minnesota's eminent psychologist Auke Tellegen, is "absorption," which describes a particular style of focusing. If you get a high score in this trait, you're naturally inclined toward what he calls a "respondent" or "experiential" way of focusing. ~ Winifred Gallagher

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality. ~ Jacque Fresco

Lie really could be construed as the art of illusion by some people. ~ Heather Graham

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent. ~ George Eliot

If schools continue to follow an outdated educational model focusing on preparation for an industrialized workforce, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant to our students and communities. ~ Eric C. Sheninger

Sometimes you need to take peoples' minds of their problems if you want those problems to resolve themselves," said Marcia. "Focusing on things can make them worse."
"Not all problems go away if you ignore them. Most don't."
"No, but not all problems can be fixed. Sometimes you have to wait until the situation changes. ~ Seanan McGuire

Never mistake complacence for the illusion of control. She is like wildfire, at once utterly beguiling and wholly untameable. ~ Lisa Mantchev

The illusion of permanence ~ I Ching

Romance is an illusion of love and excitement that touches our hearts and mind. It lingers in our memories like a fairy tale. ~ Debasish Mridha

I have spent forty-five years teasing out the universal principles of success that are necessary to create massive breakthroughs. I am committed to teaching and disseminating those around the world. I also believe that most transformational leaders are focusing too much on outer techniques and overlooking the important inner qualities of beingness and presence that are required to create real and lasting transformation in the world. ~ Jack Canfield

You are here, alive and awake and for whatever reasons you have fought your battles, it's time to start focusing on what strengths pulled you up when the entire world had knocked you down.
That's where the virtue in self grows. ~ Nikki Rowe

I may not be free, but I'm not about to surrender the illusion of choice. ~ Johnny Rich

Any attempt to wriggle, especially from leadership candidates who campaigned to leave the EU by focusing on immigration, will be unacceptable to the public. ~ Theresa May

I am convinced that those who get themselves involved in the machinery of power politics, even for the purpose of destroying it, are bound to fail in their purpose. To destroy it we have to stay out of it. If we want to cut down a tree, it is of no use to climb into its branches. The desire to keep contact with something, even to destroy it, is a subtle and insidious illusion. ~ Vinoba Bhave

Reason and religion cannot coexist together. If reason exists, then paradise, prophets and all other religiuous illusions disappear. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment and there is perfection, you know, as if I exist fully in that nanosecond of emotion. ~ Trinity Jones

We're to be married. Does it matter if I permit it?"
"To me it does, yes," says Merek. "And I imagine you, like me, appreciate the illusion of having a choice, even when illusion is all it is. ~ Melinda Salisbury

The road to recovery will not always be easy, but I will take it one day at a time, focusing on the moments I've dreamed about for so long. ~ Amanda Lindhout

The civil rights movement, legislation, and milestone court decisions of the 1950s and '60s produced remarkable changes and ended or ramped down centuries of explicit, statutory discrimination. But real integration was not one of the accomplishments.
The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.
Black America always saw the continuing schism. But white America has traditionally been free to ignore and be untroubled by it and to believe it had reached the "postracial" stage of its otherwise proud history. That was until cellphones and the Internet came along. ~ Matt Taibbi

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the "brain" of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of "other people," which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people ~ Philip Roth

It was like when I'd taken a trip to some foreign land and everyone asked about it when I got back: my accounts would grow similar, focusing on this impression, that cool place, a certain funny anecdote, until there was just the one account which then substituted for my memory. Remembering this tendency, I felt an honest fear. It was the familiar fear, made honest through sudden intensity, that once all the sensation had evaporated from my life the residue would be a cliché. I'd die, St. Peter would be like, "So how was it?" and I'd say, "Great place. I liked the food. I was sick for part of it. But all the people were really nice." And that would be it. ~ Benjamin Kunkel

We should not only refrain from thinking about gratifying our desires but also avoid focusing on not gratifying our desires. The way to deal with temptation is not to grit our teeth and make up our minds that we will not do a certain thing. The key is to fill our minds with other things. ~ David Jeremiah

The main object of the novel is to represent life ... The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. ~ Henry James

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion. ~ Heinz Pagels

But what does it mean to be on God's side? I believe it starts with focusing on the common good - not just in politics, but in all the decisions we make in our personal, family, vocational, financial, communal, and, public lives. That old but always new ethic simply says we must care for more than just ourselves or our own group. We must care for our neighbor as well, and for the health of the life we share with one another. It echoes a very basic tenet of Christianity and other faiths - love your neighbor as yourself - still the most transformational ethic in history. ~ Jim Wallis

We rehearsed at the space twice a day regardless of anything else going on in any of our lives. Many of the songs that made up Appetite and Lies - as well as more than a few from Use Your Illusion - came together in this back-alley lair. When ~ Duff McKagan

she cried as if she would cry forever. But forever was an illusion. ~ Scott Cawthon

Life never ceases. Life is an overflowing source, and death is only an obscure effect of illusions. ~ Andre Luiz Moreira

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources. ~ Zadie Smith

Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all. ~ Gregory Boyle

When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self. that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion. ~ Jed McKenna

Most will regret opening up the doors to truth, while others will cower at thought of living an illusion. In the end, does impracticality defeat curiosity? ~ Lionel Suggs

It's about focusing on the fight and not the fright. ~ Robin Roberts

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater. ~ Tony Kushner

That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice.
I'm traveling heavy with illusions. ~ Sherman Alexie

There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair. ~ Octavia E. Butler