Quotes About Awareness

But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale- lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read." "Roland

Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end - only at the end it becomes more obvious.

Remember this, if you can—there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven't. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end—only at the end it becomes more obvious. Use your time while you have it, Willie, in making something of yourself.

The most painful anguish that mortals suffer is to understand a great deal but to have no power at all.

are you breathing, are you lucky enough to be breathing

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

That's the detail of the dead woman I always remember: her bare left foot, along with packets of Top Ramen and a torn box of cat food strewn about as plastic bags danced in the wind of passing cars. I always think how, when she left the house that day, the last thing on that woman's mind must have been the possibility of dying on the pavement with dried noodles crowning her head. Maybe if she had paid more attention to detail, like the oncoming car, she would have made it home to feed her cat.

They did not know her-gods are hard for mortals to recognize.

Words as empty as the wind are best left unsaid

let not forgetfulness take you, after you are released from the kindly sweet slumber.

what's out of sight, is out of mind

there is no new experience in life. something may happen to you that you think has never happened before, that you think is brand new, but you are mistaken. you have only to see or smell or hear or feel a certain something and you will discover that this experience you thought was new has happened before.

When reporting on epidemic diseases that primarily struck the poor in Upper Silesia in 1848, the famed German pathologist Rudolf Virchow observed: "it is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation, that it forgets the most shameful happenings in the daily shame of events."82 The toleration of horrible situations that affect only the health of others is a phenomenon, sadly, that is still very much with us.

Truly, the world hath as many eyes to look upon a man withal as there are spots on a toad; so, with what pair of eyes thou regardest me lieth entirely with thine own self.

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

You can't be neutral on a moving train," I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.

The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

You can't be neutral on a moving train

Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.

I see policemen on horses galloping through the crowd, and hitting people. While I'm just taking this in, I am spun around and hit, on the side of the head, and knocked out. It had suddenly come home to me that, hey, I guess the police are not neutral. I guess the government is not neutral. . . . It was a turning point in my political consciousness.