86 Focus Quotes For Inspiration

In our fast-paced world filled with constant distractions, maintaining focus can often feel like an uphill battle. Whether you’re seeking motivation to tackle a challenging project, striving to be more present in your daily life, or looking to sharpen your goals, the right words can serve as powerful catalysts. To help you hone your concentration and ignite your drive, we’ve curated a collection of the top 86 focus quotes. These inspiring words from great thinkers, leaders, and visionaries will remind you of the importance of staying centered and motivate you to achieve your fullest potential. Dive in and let these timeless quotes be your guide as you navigate the path to a more focused and fulfilling life.

1. “Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.” - Colin Powell

2. “My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.” - Elmore Leonard

3. “Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.” - Paulo Coelho

4. “...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.” - Brian Tracy

5. “... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.” - Gretchen Rubin

6. “Knowing the Techniques of Survival........Our fears and anxieties will often drive us to build impenetrable walls that act like blinders deflecting others and preventing us from seeing who surrounds us. Getting focused to the things that matter are the Key to what has to be to COMPLETE our MISSION. "I Had Every Excuse to Fail but I Chose None" Speak Life!!!(sky)” - Sebastian K. Young

7. “Inspiration is the windfall from hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll.” - Helen Hanson

8. “Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts,and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject matter reflects he philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,--indeed, rapt--attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime.” - Winifred Gallagher

9. “Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim's stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy.” - Winifred Gallagher

10. “Research shows that when they confront a potentially unpleasant situation, such as some unfriendly faces at a gathering, these extraverts are apt to shift their attention rapidly around the room and zero in on amiable or neutral visages, thus short-circuiting the distressing images before they can get stored in memory.” - Winifred Gallagher

11. “Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace.” - Winifred Gallagher

12. “In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience--the familiar leavened by the novel--Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success.” - Winifred Gallagher

13. “Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.” - Winifred Gallagher

14. “Because you actually might not know what activities truly engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be helpful to keep a diary of what you do all day and how you feel while doing it. Then, try to do more of what's rewarding, even if it takes an effort, and less of what isn't. Where optimal experience is concerned, he says, "'I just don't have the time' often means 'I just don't have the self-discipline.” - Winifred Gallagher

15. “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.” - Winifred Gallagher

16. “Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online.” - Winifred Gallagher

17. “Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.” - Winifred Gallagher

18. “The more choices we have, the greater the need for focus.” - Tom Butler-Bowdon

19. “But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.” - Anne Lamott

20. “You can't get attention of one who focused on himself.” - Toba Beta

21. “Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.” - Ann Voskamp

22. “You cannot run at full throttle when applying your mindset to all of the different things running through your head. Focusing is the key to manifesting your desires.” - Stephen Richards

23. “In the game of life, we all receive a set of variables and limitations in the field of play. We can either focus on the lack thereof or empower ourselves to create better realities with the pieces we play the game with.” - T.F. Hodge

24. “In a culture of hyper-consumption the advertising industry has brainwashed many people into believing they can raise their status just by driving a particular brand of whatever it is they are pushing at you.” - Stephen Richards

25. “Be yourself and become wealthy!” - Stephen Richards

26. “Do not invest time and money into yourself to have others completely destroy it!” - Stephen Richards

27. “Reality is a projection of your thoughts or the things you habitually think about.” - Stephen Richards

28. “What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” - Walter Isaacson

29. “There is nothing around me but money, money, money.” - Stephen Richards

30. “No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.” - Susan Vreeland

31. “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” - C.S. Lewis

32. “If you think you can then you can.” - Stephen Richards

33. “Happiness is something we reap from the seeds we sow. Plant misery seeds and that us what you reap.” - Stephen Richards

34. “Our way of thinking creates good or bad outcomes.” - Stephen Richards

35. “It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.” - Bonnie Jo Campbell

36. “The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.” - John Stilgoe

37. “...on the job there was nothing but the job. You left the shit outside the door. You could always pick it up on your way back out.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

38. “No matter how small you start, always dream big.” - Stephen Richards

39. “It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.” - Herman Hesse

40. “You must really want to win with all of your heart! Plan your race; do not ever get side tracked. Focus on your goal - “the finishing line”!” - Lucas Remmerswaal

41. “Those who row the boat don't have time to rock it while those who rock it don't have time to row it.” - Orrin Woodward

42. “Cosmic Ordering is a dish best served today.” - Stephen Richards

43. “When you use Cosmic Ordering you will move from cloud nine to cloud ten.” - Stephen Richards

44. “Cosmic Ordering is a licence to print money.” - Stephen Richards

45. “Sweep the board with Cosmic Ordering Success.” - Stephen Richards

46. “Whatever your desire, use Cosmic Ordering to get what you require!” - Stephen Richards

47. “In the beginning man was poor, then along came Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

48. “The only secret of wealth creation is knowing how to use Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

49. “Human beings are incredibly slow, Cosmic Ordering is incredibly fast!” - Stephen Richards

50. “Often the only difference between success and failure is not using Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

51. “To fail is nothing, unless you continue to ignore Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

52. “There are more triumphs than defeats with Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

53. “The universe is full of magical things to be manifested with Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

54. “Riches will come when you follow Cosmic Ordering.” - Stephen Richards

55. “Fear   Only  Constraints  Undeveloped                       Strength                      where your eyes look to within,                      is what your heart will believe.” - Anthony Liccione

56. “The camera has always been a guide, and it's allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn't even notice.” - Don Chadwick

57. “Keep your eyes on the prize for you cant hit an unseen target but don't forget to pay the price” - Bernard Kelvin Clive

58. “Tell me your story and I will get back your life.” - Stephen Richards

59. “Willful blindness sees no end of damage done.” - Stephen Richards

60. “To make 2013 (or any other)your year, keep it simple:1) Count your blessings first2) Whatever you did last year, Do it better3) Go step by step, One day at a time.4) Create/make your own opportunities.5) Believe in your abilities at all times,6) Qutting is not an option. Keep Going.7) Finish what you started” - Pablo

61. “In order to pick something up, you've got to put something down.” - Todd Stocker

62. “It's not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.” - Nathan W. Morris

63. “We spend a lot of time trying to get more and more things, not realizing that those things can never fulfill us. Learn from those who have gone before you - stuff can never satisfy your desires, so focus on THE ONE who can.” - Osayi Osar-Emokpae

64. “Activities such as chanting, bowing, and sitting in zazen are not at all wasted, even when done merely formally, for even this superficial encounter with the Dharma will have some wholesome outcome at a later time. However, it must be said in the most unambiguous terms that this is not real Zen. To follow the Dharma involves a complete reorientation of one's life in such a way that one's activities are manifestations of, and are filled with, a deeper meaning. If it were not otherwise, and merely sitting in zazen were enough, every frog in the pond would be enlightened, as one Zen master said. Dōgen Zenji himself said that one must practice Zen with the attitude of a person trying to extinguish a fire in his hair. That is, Zen must be practiced with an attitude of single-minded urgency.” - Francis Harold Cook

65. “No matter what your wishes, they are not crazy so long as they are not crazy to you!” - Stephen Richards

66. “Focus is the soul of success.” - Sandeep Kakkar

67. “You put yourself where you are, and if you find yourself unsatisfied with how you are, then get yourself out of it.” - Stephen Richards

68. “To control your life, control your mind. To control your mind, control your breath.” - Stephen Richards

69. “Your life is in your hands. Only YOU have the capacity to turn it into a rosy path or a thorn filled one. Increase your vibrational output with Cosmic Ordering and your future will be rosy.” - Stephen Richards

70. “Stop harboring grudges against those who have wronged you, it just holds you back when you really want to be in the NOW.” - Stephen Richards

71. “Many surround themselves with luminaries, but in so doing they dull their own sparkle. If you want to shine bright, look to the heavens and see how the brightest star always stands apart from those lesser shining stars.” - Stephen Richards

72. “May our eyes focus rightly on Christ ... before the need to please others, before church, and before the busyness of Christian life. Those things will surely have their place, but they will be most valuable if put in their proper position.” - Traci LaRussa

73. “I make love with a focus and intensity that most people reserve for sleep.” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

74. “If you are going to be a doubter, I don't need your negative energy.” - Stephen Richards

75. “When dreams are not clear, the results are often as blurred. You won't be able to arrive at your desired destination if you are not certain of where you're going. You have to be able to see clearly and perfectly.” - Jan Mckingley Hilado

76. “Narrow the focus, take the ascent one step at a time, and it's amazing what odds a man can beat.” - Courtney Schafer

77. “When the zone calls, you must listen. You never know how long being in the zone lasts. It is a cardinal rule - you must take advantage of every second that you are in the zone.” - John Passaro

78. “When you know who you are, you know what to do.” - Shelley Hendrix

79. “Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.” - John le Carré

80. “Don't look at the present storm, but look to the Son coming.” - Anthony Liccione

81. “Become your own success story, not someone else's.” - Stephen Richards

82. “Yesterday's shortcuts are today's nightmares. The race is quicker when we're stricter. Keep your eyes on today, and declare what you may.” - Mark O'Brien

83. “Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.” - David Foster Wallace

84. “Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other.” - Gen Urobuchi

85. “Excuses fall silent behind self-control, focus, and direction.” - Lorii Myers

86. “Positive thinking without any thought is wasted ...” - Stephen Richards