IDLENESS

'Idleness is not just a vacation, and indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets...it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.' 

Tim Kreider in Cal Newport, Deep Work, p.143. 

CONCENTRATION

'If you want to win the war for attention, don't try to say "no"  to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say "yes" to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.' 

David Brooks in Cal Newport, Deep Work, p.137. 

ATTENTION MANAGEMENT

'Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counselling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention in the sine qua non of the good life and the key to virtually every aspect of your experience.' 

Winifred Gallagher in Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, p.77. 

BIBLE STUDY

'Take every word as spoken to yourselves. When the word thunders against sin, think thus: "God means my sins;" when it presseth on any duty, "God intends me in this." Many put off Scripture from themselves, as if it only concerned those who lived in the time when it was written; but if you intend to profit by the word, bring it home to yourselves: a medicine will not no good, unless it can be applied.' 

Thomas Watson in David Mathis, Habits of Grace, p.62. 

BIBLICAL MEDITATION

'The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is, because we do not warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.' 

Thomas Watson in David Mathis, Habits of Grace, p.58. 

BIBLICAL MEDITATION

'We were made to meditate. God designed us with the capacity to pause and ponder. He means for us to not just hear him, not only to read quickly over what he says, but to reflect on what he says and knead it into our hearts. 

It is a distinctively human trait to stop and consider, to chew on something with the teeth of our minds and hearts, to roll some reality around in our thoughts and press it deeply into our feelings, to look from different angles and seek to get a better sense of its significance.' 

David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines, p.55.

KINDNESS

'Just after I first got ill, and while I was waiting for my prostrate operation, I was wearing my urinary tract externally, in an arrangement featuring a catheter plus a hefty plastic bag taped to my leg. Or anyway it was hefty when it was full. One night the bag broke and suddenly the floor was awash with amber piss. I signaled the night nurse, who told me to stop apologizing. (In such circumstances, I have found, one tends to apologize for one's mere existence.) She set about mopping it up. She had a deformed body, with limbs all the wrong lengths. Life could never have been easy for her. But now she was making the end of life easier for me. It was a night to remember, and I haven't forgotten it for a second. I can only hope that the sum total of my writings has been as useful to the world as her kindness, but I doubt that this is so.'  

Clive James, Latest Readings, p.176. 

WRITING

'...it is always fatal, I have found, when you have something of your own to write, to get too close to someone else's music. It gets into your lungs like secondary smoking.'

Clive James, Latest Readings, p.164. 

BOOK CRAZY

'We are often told that the next generation of lierati won't have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It's a rational solution, but that's probably what's wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.'

Clive James, Latest Readings, p.122. 

FEMINISM

'Feminism is an ideology, and like any other ideology it can easily transmute a necessary perception into an indulgent madness.' 

Clive James, Latest Readings, p.112.