Quotes About Awareness

Be ... suspicious ... of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription ... Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.

A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

The problem with open-mindedness is that it can become empty-mindedness

The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.

I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

He was also dying, though we didn't know it yet.

Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: "the power of facing unpleasant facts"). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..

By the way, if you knew how you sounded when you hissed, you wouldn't do it: you sound like such berks when you do that.

the awareness that the distinction between "over here" and "over there," or between "home" and "abroad" is often a false one has never left me.

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.

It kindled in me a resolution which I have tried to keep ever since: to spend at least once every year a little time in a country less fortunate than my own. (If

Coincidence, said Louis Pasteur, has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it.

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.

The most educated person in the world now has to admit—I shall not say confess—that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

If you can't hear, I hope it's not my fault.

Hegel said that history was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself.

there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

Beneath outer consciousness, two other beings, anonymous, impersonal, without labels, had met and recognized each other and clasped hands.