Quotes About Awareness

While we are aiming at clear ideas, the food gets cold and tasteless.

Never lose sight of this important truth, that no one can be truly great until he has gained a knowledge of himself, a knowledge which can only be acquired by occasional retirement.

Quem, de três milênios, não é capaz de se dar conta, vive na ignorância, na sombra, à mercê dos dias, do tempo.

She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn't kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.

It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.

We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: "If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.

If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there's some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.

Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. "I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You're not giving yourself more energy—you're just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you're doubly exhausted.

If you picture of a perfect After-life, it's being with the people you love all the time. He asked me: Why wouldn't you choose today: when you're still alive, to be truely present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions!?

It's the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake." Let them be present.

When we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth,' and when we turn off the spotlight, 'we still have the same bandwidth - it's just we can allocate more of those resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down - it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.

Depression is a kind of constricted consciousness," Bill Richards, who also led the experiments at Johns Hopkins, told me. "You could say people have forgotten who they are, what they're capable of, have gotten stuck … Many depressed people can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures. They can't see the blue sky and the yellow leaves, you know?

She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.