Quotes About Awareness

Ma è sempre così: il tempo di distogliere il pensiero dal quotidiano, da se stessi e dallo spezzatino, e ti scappa un'idiozia.

Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life...

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.

It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.

It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present

The faces we lose track of most easily are the faces of the people who are closest to us, the people we love the most whose faces we see so often that we can't really see them anymore.

I did not see anything because I was so caught up in an inner dialogue. So, stop and see. Become more sensitive, more aware, more alive to our own humanness, to the humanness of each other.

There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.

To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody.

It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.

Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.

People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas.

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer.

Yes, take your times seriously. Yes, know that you are judged by the terrible sins of your times. Yes, you do well to faint with fear and foreboding at what is coming on the world. And yet rejoice. Rejoice. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety. Pray.

Writing does a lot of other things, of course. People write books to instruct. They write books to move us, to scare us, to enlighten us in all sorts of ways. But basically what these works of literature or of art are doing is to say, Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this.

It's so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don't. If you're like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what's there.

Some know the value of education by having it. I know it's value by not having it.

Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was very present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro...Sir, the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake.

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.