Mental Absorption Quotes

For contemplation is both the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity.

When I read, I'm purely a reader.

When you trance out properly, when you're completely in that world, there is no other world, so there's no conflict.

Whenever your mind is totally absorbed in whatever activities you are performing, your mind will remain calm and content.

Thus one memory follows another until the waves dash together over our heads, and a deep sigh swells the breast, which warns us that we have forgotten to breathe in the midst of these pure thoughts.

Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do.

Don't give way to heedlessness or to intimacy with sensual delight - for a heedful person, absorbed in jhana, attains an abundance of ease.

Running a marathon is just like reading a good book. After a while you're just not conscious of the physical act of reading.

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

In order that knowledge be properly digested it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.

Sometimes when I'm at my desk, I'll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven't moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house.

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

It takes me a while to absorb things.

I think you can lose yourself in any creative activity - if you enjoy your job or enjoy a task, you can lose yourself in that.

You are truly focused when you're so focused that you don't know you're focused.

His answer trickled through my head like water through a sieve.

When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

don't stop to think of the words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better-and let your mind off yourself in this work.

Just as the pure crystal takes color from the object which is nearest to it, so the mind, when it is cleared of thought-waves, achieves sameness or identity with the object of its concentration.

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

I don't digest things with my mind.

But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.