Quotes About Consciousness

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why can't I just love the flower for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

Annie Dillard once wrote, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing." I think about this a lot when I'm planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.

People love to make big pronouncements about poetry saving us. And I want to believe that, but for now, what I can say is … poetry can make us feel. And right now, maybe that's enough. It doesn't have to bring us hope or joy, it just has to remind us that we feel. That we are alive, and here, and feeling the world.

WHAT WE GAIN FROM MINDFULNESS

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see.

the motion of our blood could almost stop, our bodies be laid to sleep, but somehow the soul be kept alive. Simply by the things we saw and heard, in any given moment

There was just the sensation of it. A

If you keep your eyes closed, your mind will show you all kinds of crazy movies...But with your eyes open, all you had to face was the nothingness of what you were really doing.

The ways we miss our lives is life', Randall Jarrell quoted by A.P.

Listen to the sound inside.

The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.

In Wirklichkeit war ich schon wach, aber ich hielt noch die Augen zu, um die Traaumgestalten noch länger vor meiner Seele zu behalten.

There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.

There are certain truths which stand out so openly on the roadsides of life, as it were, that every passer-by may see them. Yet, because of their obviousness, the general run of people disregard such truths or at least they do not make them the object of any concious knowledge. People are so bliend to some of the simplest facts in everyday life that they are highly surprised when somebody calls attention to what everybody ought to know.

matters less than your consciousness about that life.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.

Every act of becoming conscious (it says here in this book) is an unnatural act

The moment when a feeling enters the body is political.

Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.

Eight minutes past the hour here in Belgium - and presumably eight minutes past the hour everywhere in the world.

The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.

I don't think we can sit on the fence anymore. We have to make up our minds. And if one wants to choose the path of darkness, then so be it, but be conscious of what it is you're doing.