Quotes About Awareness

The second stage in Mussar practice involves restraint. Our new awareness calls out for active steps to change the circumstances of our lives. Once we realize how rarely the moments of real silence occur in our days, we can restrain the input and the output of noise that swirls around us. We do have a choice.

Awaken to the good and give thanks.

Take time, be exact, unclutter the mind. —Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter of Kelm

THE SEISMOGRAPH HAS TAUGHT us that a tremor in any part of the world can be felt by a sufficiently sensitive instrument everywhere in the world. The same is true of a person's deeds. One should not think that his actions do not affect others. Everything one does in some way affects everyone else in the world. —RABBI YERUCHAM LEVOVITZ (1873–1936)

Equanimity is a quality of being centered in yourself, though at the same time being exquisitely sensitive to the forces that are at work all around, or else you will be vulnerable to being tossed around by the sorts of unexpected waves that crash in on every life.

ANYONE WHO HAS PREJUDICES and whose perceptions are colored by self-interest will never see the truth in any area in which his bias operates. Only when his bias is removed will he be able to understand the truth. —RABBI ELIYAHU DESSLER (1892–1953)

MODESTY IS NOT ABOUT being covered up, but about awareness of a private life and of personal dignity. Today this concept of private dignity does not exist. As a result, everything is flaunted, everything is public. —RABBI YAAKOV WEINBERG (1923–1999)

It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it.

Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.

He understood that things appear different in daytime and nighttime, even though they are the same.

I imagined were his own litmus test, saying, "If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul to lose.

Evolution stops at the neck.

Gulls, aeroplaning above the chimney pots, were calling that he must talk to Laura about his plans. He needed no telling, for once in tune to their outlandish cries.

We die, he said. We die, I said. And knowing this how do we live? Knowing this, we live. We live.

Our job as writers is to be as curious as a child, to see things for the first time, and to never assume. We must always be willing to surrender our idea of the story to allow the larger story to emerge. We are seeking to understand the nature of things, the underlying forces at work.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.