Quotes About Awareness

THE WILD ROSE" – BY WENDELL BERRY Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart. Suddenly you flare again in my sight A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only shade And I am blessed and choose again, That which I chose before.

I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will. Sabbaths 1999 II

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

Time doesn't stop. Your life doesn't stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.

The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it.

He loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own.

I had reached a level of sophistication at which I could know I was fooling myself and still fool myself.

Never forget: we are alive within mysteries. - Wendell Berry

The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer...the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; ...

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't.

He wasn't much of a listener, not a great payer of attention to things outside his head.

Self-knowledge liberates us from the frustration of ignorance, while simultaneously nurturing and supporting our capacity for intelligence. Objectivity

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal test will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

Mercy begins with a deep awareness of one's own need for it. Whereas Alinsky first sees injustice in others, the man of mercy first sees sin within himself.

Maybe she's right," I reasoned. "Maybe I shouldn't worry so much about taking accurate readings. Maybe I should spend more time just relaxing, and looking calmly at the world around me. Maybe that would help me get well again.

Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.

I want you to look and think. I want every one to look and think. Half the misery in the world comes first from not looking, and then from not thinking. And I do not want you to be miserable.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.

We are going home (we are Home, already and always). Home on this earth is being all levels of our awareness or consciousness in our own unique fashion. (138)