inner focus Quotes

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.

You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.

Before I walk onto the stage, it's about the centrality of Jesus and just really keeping a focus on Jesus as opposed to ourselves.

You could have all the tools in the world, but if you really don't want to be there, or if there's something that's off course that's playing on your mind... the game of golf is so mental, and if you don't have everything in the right order, it's very difficult to win golf tournaments.

Whatever art form you're working in, it's crucial to see it clearly, to feel it clearly, and not to worry about the results, or how someone else will see it.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

At a certain point you stop looking at your features, at what you don't look like. You start looking at lines and signs of fatigue rather than at the shape of your mouth.

Success is a beast. And it actually puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. You get away with more instead of looking within.

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.

Let none find fault with others; let none see the omissions and commissions of others. But let one see one's own acts, done and undone.

Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!

I start out making my paintings for me. I don't see it as a form of communication. Until, of course, after they are done and I want people to see them. And want them to be recognized. But while I am making them I just try to get lost in them. Kind of like it's a prayer.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

I'm not that interested in what people make of it, or how people consider me. That's nothing to do with me.

My care is for myself; Myself am whole and sole reality.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

You've got to tune out the other people and tune in to what's going on inside. Love yourself. Nourish your body.

We know even from ordinary life that we have to achieve a sufficient degree of attentiveness if we want to concentrate on an inner picture or an object of some kind; we must also have it in our power, though, to turn our soul away from something we have been concentrating on.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

I never think about my face. I actually just care about what I'm doing - my voice and my character. I don't care about, 'Am I fat? Am I ugly?'

One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.