Tim Wu Quotes

“The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.”

“It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.”

“Attention is the most concrete expression of love. What we pay attention to thrives. What we do not pay attention to withers and dies. What will you pay attention to today?”

“There is a big difference between getting attention and being respected. Try not to waste your lifetime seeking for worldly attention. All the attention in the world will never make up for the lack of self-love in one's life.”

“Shift your attention, and your emotion shifts. Shift your emotion, and your attention shifts.”

“Don’t beg for attention”

“There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.”

“When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me.”

“Yet he argued that even a tedious topic can take on a certain fascination if you make an effort to look at it afresh: "The subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.”

“Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.”