While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.
— George Washington
Jittery Inattentive quotations
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.
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
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.
When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.
Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that you ever meet. Interest and attention will insure to you an education.
Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
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
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.
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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 popularity is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress.
If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.
The only thing that is not art is inattention
I value mothers and motherhood enormously.
For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook;
he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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.
Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
Adolescents sometimes say..."My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention.
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible;
it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
my Mamá Grande, a tiny Mayan woman, took me aside when I was an adolescent and told me several things that didn't make a bit of sense to my young and inattentive ears, and as young people tend to waste all attempts of our elders to relay to us wisdom accumulated over the decades, I thought my Mamá Grande had a few mice in the attic.
Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from.
..the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence.
In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.
Training a child is exactly like training a puppy;
a little heedless inattention and it is out of hand immediately; the great thing is not to let it acquire bad habits that must afterward be broken.
I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.
... It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.
the apathy and inattention of the average citizen is beyond comprehension.
What is the difference between attention and inattention? What is attention and what is concentration? ...Attention has no centre.
Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente.
It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.
The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts in the hour of danger.
In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
Tell me about yourself, Miss Russel." I started to give him the obligatory response, first the demurral and then the reluctant flat autobiography, but some slight air of polite inattention in his manner stopped me. Instead, I found myself grinning at him. "Why don't you tell me about myself, Mr. Holmes?
The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.
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!