Quotes About Awareness

Though I knew that actually I had heard no voice, I could not dismiss the possibility that it had spoken and I had failed to hear it because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done….I decided that I had better accept the call that had not come, just in case it had come and I had missed it.

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.

Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.

These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions.

Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

My wish is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

You can't know who you are until you know where you are.

I had heard it all before—most of us had—but John T. had never heard any of it, because he usually didn't listen to anybody but himself. He was shocked. For almost a full minute, Sam having spoken to his satisfaction and John T. unable to speak at all, they just looked at each other.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

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. Burley Coulter

Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam; she could hear spiders chewing on flies.

By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn.

A spring wind blowing the smell of the ground through the intersections of traffic, the mind turns, seeks a new nativity- another place, simpler, less weighted by what has already been.

A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience.

I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness--the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.

Sometimes he would be finished talking before we had started listening.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with.

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season… and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go. Sabbaths 2000 II

Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.