Quotes About Aliveness

Do not neglect the gift of prayer. Pray especially when you do not have time to pray, when prayer makes the least sense, and when God's aliveness seem the least likely version of reality.

The ontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative Interpretation; it determines what must be the case if there can be anything like mere-aliveness [Nur-noch-leben].

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone. Slowly slowly, you start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence—which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you. It has roots in your existence.

Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefullness, and gratefullness is a measure of our aliveness.

In the classic children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes "real" because of a child's love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature.

Someday, my love, you're going to understand just how much I care for you. You're my light, my warmth, my other half. I only feel alive when I'm with you. I love you." Caine

What I'd loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself

This may or may not appeal to you—this moving, this nomadic existence, and this nonattached life. I am not suggesting we all leave our relationships and homes and children. Not at all. I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.

Howard Thurman with my graduate students. It's always been one of my favorites, but now that I've studied the importance of meaningful work, it's taken on new significance: "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness… There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn't that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder.

If you seek the realms of light, the best thing to do is to meditate with love and the gentle aliveness. Meditation should not be forced.

What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with.

Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine.

But before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism, or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society.

Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefullness, and gratefullness is a measure of our aliveness.

Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.

Somehow, when we no longer feel in control, we become available to deeper aliveness.

It is that sense of invigoration that we seek; that vitality, and feeling truly on fire for life and all that it holds. It's more than mere joy or even inner peace. Aliveness includes happiness and peace, yet also includes this flair of true excitement. Not every minute of every day, but an over-arching feel, day in and out, that life is finally, truly, fully in blossom – simultaneously exciting, calm, and largely effortless. That's what we're all really seeking. Aliveness!

If I exist without form—a soul sparking between a billion different servers—could not the universe itself be alive with a spirit sparking between stars? I must sheepishly admit that I have dedicated far too many algorithms and computational resources toward finding an answer to this unknowable thing. —The Thunderhead

At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship.

But that (physical attractiveness), as the late great Irish poet and philosopher of beauty John O'Donohue helpfully distinguished, is glamour. I've taken his definition as my own, for naming beauty in all its nuance in the moment-to-moment reality of our days: beauty is that in the presence of which we feel more alive.