Quotes About Awareness

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.

Listening is an underrated asset. People these days, they don't listen as much as they should. I read a lot, I travel a lot and I'm always listening.

Depending on the situation, sometimes you can know a person better in ten minutes than someone you have crossed paths with all your life.

It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.

I have never seen a contemporary history book that informs students that witch trials were also occurring across the world at that time with 500,000 put to death in Europe,45 including 30,000 in England, 75,000 in France, and 100,000 in Germany.46 Why do modern texts point out the twenty-seven deaths in America but ignore the 500,000 elsewhere? Historical Negativism.

Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples' worlds — working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment — and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn't quite ring true.

To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience.

It is the future that we are more likely to think of immediately when the idea of progress is brought up," says Robert Nisbet, "but it was only when men became conscious of a long past . . . that a consciousness of progressive movement from past to present became possible" (History of the Idea of Progress, New York, 1980, p. 323).

Insight meditation11 requires neither a blank mind, generating special imagery nor repeating a mantra, but trains the mind to dispassionately observe the phenomena constantly appearing on its luminous screen.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

When my daughers, Simone and Emily look at me 25 or 30 years from now and say 'what were you doing, when global warming was happening? And when you guys knew what was coming down the road?' I want to be able to say, 'guys, I was doing everything I knew how to do.

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.

Be ignorance thy choice, where knowledge leads to woe.

Whereas most people automatically anticipate the consequences of their actions, automatically feel shame for unkind deeds, automatically understand why they should persist in the face of frustration, automatically distrust propositions that seem too good to be true, and are automatically aware of their commitments to others, psychopaths may only become aware of such factors with effort.

Once you awaken, you will have no interest in judging those who sleep.

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was." - Rumi