Quotes About Awareness

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind. William James, The Principles of Psychology

The fact that you cannot understand it does not mean that it doesn't exist.

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. —SIR JOHN LUBBOCK THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE AND THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, 1892

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.

There has been a change in men's attitudes toward their clothes. Men are more aware of fashion they're not afraid of it.

It is strange how oftentimes the air speaks. We are sane as long as we hear voices when there are none. We are insane when we hear nothing and worse we are deaf.

Don't forget that déjà vu is the word that when you look it up the dictionary says, "You've looked this up before, haven't you?

The greatest handicap faced by the psychiatrist was, he argued, the inability to experience their patients' conditions; but hashish gave them a means to do so, safely and reversibly: Can we be certain we are in a condition to understand these sick people when they tell us of their observations? [...] To comprehend the ravings of a madman, it is necessary to have raved oneself, but without having lost the awareness of one's madness. -Mike Jay

I don't care how smart a kid you are. The only way you learn what's not right is from experience.

to be unkind because you are thoughtless is the worst kind of blindness.

How did you explain a thing it had not occurred to you to question? A thing you just knew, clear through to your soul?

To truly love takes seeing truly.

Our eyes see different things, I thought. They always have. Even when we're looking in the same direction, standing side by side.

But seeing someone is not the same as knowing them.

I may not know where you come from, but that's not the same as not knowing who you are.

As if the years he had spent interpreting signs that no one else could even see had stretched him, pulled him out of focus.

Everything is beautiful in its own way, ma belle, even if you have to look hard to find it.

Men are quite unobservant, you know. They see only what they wish to see.

Sometimes it is better to know an unpleasant thing than nothing at all.

I didn't yet perceive the way everything that happens is connected-didn't realize that opening a door that led to outside exploration would inevitably open a door to the unexplored places inside myself.

It all depends on what you think is important, and, when the important stuff is happening, whether you're looking directly at it or looking away.

To really understand nature, we have to do more than glance, and we have to think beyond our knee-jerk reaction that insists since we make things with intent, nature must also be made with intent. If we want to understand better than a child, we have to look harder, and think deeper.

It made me angry that people could simply kill other people, take what they wanted, and ignore the cries of the sick and hungry. The world wasn't like that— or it shouldn't be like that—even though I hadn't seen enough of the world to know what it was really like.