Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week

July 26-Aug. 1, 2026 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Inability to Concentrate"

Back in the Saddle Again!

As most of you know, I’ve been reprising previous posts since my recent shoulder surgery. I finally decided to attempt a new issue this week, but, truth be told, I’m not entirely sure I was ready. Putting this week’s piece together proved far more difficult than I expected.

In choosing concentration as this week’s theme, I selected the very problem I’ve been wrestling with over the past few weeks: great difficulty in maintaining my concentration. Reading for more than a few minutes became surprisingly difficult, and writing—which normally absorbs me for hours at a time—turned into a series of frustrating starts and stops.

My mind wandered, my train of thought repeatedly slipped away, and I found myself expending far more effort to accomplish far less than usual. Even now, after reading the finished piece several times, I’m not sure I’ve fully regained the ability to judge its quality. If this week’s effort falls a bit short of my usual standards, I hope you’ll attribute it to a mind that is still on the mend.

Opening Line of the Week

This opening line looks fairly simple at first reading, but it demonstrates an important principle in great fiction: the visible action is often less important than what the character is thinking or feeling. On the surface, we see someone making a special effort to do something that once came naturally: dice an onion. Beneath the surface, we’re witnessing someone whose mind appears to be under siege.

The word “forced” does almost all the work—subtly suggesting that Elise’s attention is elsewhere, and our curiosity naturally shifts from the act of onion-cutting to the unseen burden she’s carrying. It’s an elegant example of how a great opening line can create suspense without any overt drama.

For more than 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

This week’s Mystery Man at Four Stages of his adult life

On June 17, 1882, this man was born in a small Russian resort town on the Gulf of Finland, about 30 miles west of Saint Petersburg. Raised in a musical family—his father was a celebrated operatic bass singer and his mother an accomplished pianist—he began studying the piano as a boy.

Although his parents steered him toward a legal career, he became increasingly devoted to music and studied privately with the renowned Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Ultimately, three revolutionary ballet scores established his international reputation—The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913), the last of which famously caused an uproar at its Paris premiere.

Over a career spanning more than six decades, this week’s Mystery Man repeatedly reinvented his musical style and became one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century. After living for many years in Switzerland and France, he settled in the United States, becoming an American citizen at age 65 in 1948. He died at age 88 in New York City on April 6, 1971.

In a 1967 interview in The New York Review of Books, this week’s Mystery Man offered a variety of thoughts on life at eighty-five, including this poignant reflection on his own diminishing powers:

In the interview, he continued:

“But there are others. My slips in writing are frequent now, and my manuscripts must be vetted…. So is my hide-and-seek memory, now in hiding more often than not. I have orchestrated the same page twice, greeted perfect strangers in Russian, and performed a variety of other equally scatterbrained acts.”

Who is this man? (Answer below)

Have You Ever Lost the Ability to Concentrate?

For most of my life, I’ve taken my ability to concentrate for granted. Whenever I wanted to read, write, or think through an idea, I simply sat down and did it. For the most part, concentration was like breathing or walking—I didn’t give it a second thought.

Then, following my recent shoulder surgery, something that was always there when I needed it mysteriously disappeared.

It wasn’t because of the pain. With the help of medication, the pain itself was quite manageable. But somehow, a combination of factors—the surgery itself, the anesthesia used in the procedure, and the predictable discomfort associated with a slowly healing wound—quietly kidnapped my ability to concentrate.

I could still answer e-mails, return text messages, pay bills, water my plants, and handle other routine chores. But when I sat down to write something original—like a new weekly post—I discovered that I simply couldn’t hold an idea in my mind long enough to fully develop it. It was a strange and deeply unsettling experience.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, though, let’s clarify what we mean by concentration.

The APA definition nicely captures the cognitive side of concentration—marshaling our many and varied mental resources and focusing them on a single task. But concentration isn’t merely about thinking intently; it’s also about not thinking about that which is peripheral or irrelevant to the task at hand.

Former New York Mets third baseman Ray Knight, who was named the Most Valuable Player of the 1986 World Series, proved that he had verbal skills to match his athletic ones when he expressed the idea this way:

Knight’s observation captures an important truth about human life. Whether the challenge is hitting a ninety-eight-mile-per-hour fastball, making a delicate surgical incision, or making a game-winning free-throw with one second remaining on the clock, effective performance often depends less on filling the mind with the right thoughts than on keeping the wrong ones—the distracting ones—from seeping into our consciousness.

Knight’s observation also made me rethink what happens when people are unable to concentrate. When golfers lose a match by missing a four-foot putt on the 18th green, we often say they “lost” their concentration. But perhaps that's not quite right. More likely, their attention was captured by a distracting thought, a surge of anxiety, or the overwhelming realization of what was at stake. It might be more accurate to say that their concentration wasn't lost—it was commandeered by a more compelling concern.

Nearly every meaningful accomplishment—whether writing a book, composing a musical score, solving a mathematical problem, running a successful political campaign, or building a successful business—depends on our ability to gather our scattered attention and sustain it on a single task. When concentration falters, our work almost inevitably suffers.

Etymology

The history of the word is surprisingly rich because it has played a key role in chemistry (a concentrated liquid) and physics (the concentrated rays of the sun) long before it took on a psychological meaning.

In the early 1600s, Italian scientists used the Latin centrum (for “center”) to coin the term concentrare, meaning “to bring to a common center” or “to gather into a single point.” From Italian, the word passed into French (as concentrer), and then into English in the 1600s, where it was initially used to describe the process of collecting, condensing, or intensifying matter or force.

In the 1700s, the word began to be extended to the idea of mental energy, and by the 1800s, the word was widely understood to mean the concentration of one’s thoughts, attention, or mental powers on a single task. Today, it is still possible to see the ancient roots in such modern sayings as these:

We often think of concentration as some kind of extra-special mental activity, like chess players planning their next move. In reality, though, it lies at the heart of almost every worthwhile human endeavor. Talent is important, yes. And motivation as well. But without concentration, they are worthless.

As I delved a bit deeper into the subject this week, I learned that there are a variety of things that can disrupt our ability to concentrate, including pain, illness, fatigue, medication, trauma, dehydration, and lack of sleep. Others are more psychological, including stress, anxiety, depression, grief, anger, or worry.

Still others are more subtle, including the constant interruptions of our digital age and the normal aging process, both of which can seriously erode our capacity to keep our minds fixed on a single task (the latter is what this week’s Mystery Man had in mind when he spoke of “leaks” in concentration). Whatever the source, the result is the same: our thoughts begin to wander, our focus splinters, and even routine mental tasks require far more effort than they once did.

One of the most fascinating things about concentration is that we rarely notice it when it’s working well. Like good health, restful sleep, sharp eyesight, a sense of balance, or a reliable memory, concentration quietly goes about its work in the background. It asks nothing of us, and so we seldom stop to appreciate it. Only when it slips away—as mine temporarily did after surgery—do we discover how essential it really is.

The encouraging news is that concentration, unlike some of life’s other gifts, usually returns. Mine is beginning to return now, slowly but unmistakably, and for that I am truly grateful. Along the way, however, I’ve been reminded of a larger truth: we often appreciate our greatest blessings only after we’ve temporarily lost them.

I know, of course, that not everyone is so fortunate. Many people never regain abilities that illness, injury, or advancing age has taken from them. That realization has made my own gradual recovery feel less like something I earned than something I was given. And when my mind once again settles deeply into a book or remains absorbed in writing for hours at a time, I don’t expect to ever again take that quiet gift for granted.

This week, think about times in your life when you experienced a significant loss of concentration. What, in your view, was the cause? And what were the chief consequences of the loss? As you reflect on the whole matter, let your thinking be stimulated by this week’s selection of quotations on the theme:

• If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. — Maya Angelou

QUOTE NOTE: In this observation, Angelou was almost certainly inspired by a classic quotation from Samuel Johnson, to be seen below.

• Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn’t look up. Well, maybe once. — Isaac Asimov

• There is no great success without concentration. — Bruce Barton

• Anyone who has achieved excellence in any form knows that it comes as a result of ceaseless concentration. — Louise Brooks

• The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. — Thomas Carlyle

• Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. What the (Inter)Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. — Nicholas Carr

• Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight in one blow: to live eternity in an hour. — Elbert Hubbard

• Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. — Samuel Johnson

• When every physical and mental resource is focused, one’s power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously. — Norman Vincent Peale

• The best advice I ever came across on the subject of concentration is: Wherever you are, be there. — Jim Rohn

For source information on these quotations, and many other quotations on the topic of CONCENTRATION, go to here.

Cartoon of the Week

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next week, when the theme will be “Jealousy.”

Mardy Grothe

My Two Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note