Quotes About Awareness

As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, "It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are." Two

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

Now I see it's in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it is a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring, the seasons of transition, than in summer and winter. But what that means, I realize as the years pass, is that nothing can be taken for granted; people are on alert, wide awake, ready to seize each day as a blessing because the next one can't be counted on.

Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out. · What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not. · In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.

So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can change my life by changing the way I look at it.

If you think, 'I breathe,' " said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, "the 'I' is extra.

Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the world and everyone in it.

As it is common to hear now, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love - our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything - so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it.

You learned about autumn early.

Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.

told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama's teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we'd read at school, from Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

L'homme ne s'avise de la réalité que quand il l'a représentée. Et rien, jamais, n'a pu mieux la représenter que le théâtre.

Passivo come un uccello che vede tutto, volando, e si porta in cuore nel volo in cielo la coscienza che non perdona.

Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure. Carry out an action with complete attention and intensity, as if it were your last.

whether we are aware of it or not, every act of trust carries with it a shiver of fear.

To be in the present with someone else is a gift. The gift of attention is perhaps the most precious and envied of all, even though we do not always realize it.

We can find beauty anywhere. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it needs some commitment on our part. Sometimes it jumps out at us suddenly, other times we come upon it slowly.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.

O pedante compreende sem sentimento profundo, enquanto o mundano usufrui sem compreender.

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.