Quotes About Awareness

When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird's-eye view, you tend to become arrogant— you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance," Yunus wrote.

So, basically, my view is I don't want to support the exploitation of animals, and within reason, I will do what I can to avoid it, but it's not like it's a religion for me. It's not like I consider I'm polluted if somehow some bit of milk or cheese or something passes my lips.

In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions.

We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.

People may hope that the meat they buy came from an animal who died without pain, but they do not really want to know about it. Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed do not deserve to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.

The plucked and dressed bodies of the chickens will then be sold to millions of families who will gnaw on their bones without pausing for an instant to think that they are eating the dead body of a once living creature, or to ask what was done to that creature in order to enable them to buy and eat its body.

A humanist is a person who can say: I am human, nothing written down is strange to me.

Wer komplexe Wirklichkeit leugnet, gibt sich gern objektiv und bezichtigt die Problembewussten der Wirklichkeitsflucht und der Träumerei.

If it's reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.

Mit den Wochen und Monaten wurde das Nachdenken weniger, und sie lernte, einfach nur da zu sein, in einem Zustand aufmerksamer Gleichgültigkeit.

Man nahm den Wald nur wahr, wenn man sich in ihm befand.

the inevitable tension between knowledge and innocence

I want to stay away from politics, or else I'll probably end up putting my size fifteen foot into my mouth.

Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don't have any of those things. They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening.

Books that would have helped us understand our past, without which we are condemned to live in ignorance

Thats the thing about pain, it demands to be felt

Pain demands to be felt.

This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

You said it was colorful. What changed?" "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more." "So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked. Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know." "How?" I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered. "I wake up smiling," I said.

PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. –ALBERT EINSTEIN

You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.