Quotes About Awareness

It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about.

Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

In high school, whites are sometimes asked to think about race, but rarely about whiteness.

As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.

When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, "My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.

For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The

As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.

We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to - how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. How

It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.

The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: "The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought." We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

Keep your ears open. You know what the first word of the holy rule of Saint Benedict is? Listen.

Their humanity has been forgotten," Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians—as either savages or victims.

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. —THICH NHAT HANH

The Tail End" by Tim Urban on the Wait But Why blog—if you only read one article this month, make it that one. It

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. —DAVE BARRY

the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses, or—in this case—to count the pea pods.

Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.

I've realized that instead of following the trends, you want to identify the trends but not follow them. It's good to recognize trends, but if you follow them, you get sucked into them, and then you also fall with the trend.

More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice