Quotes About Awareness

People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.

If I hold her hand she says, 'Don't touch!' If I hold her foot she says 'Don't touch!' But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.

Nobody can teach me who I am.

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

This equation has helped many people I know identify the difference between practicing happiness and pursuing it. When my happiness feels elusive, I tend to ask myself, "What am I not being grateful for, and what am I pursuing that's distracting me from that gratitude?

As Viktor Frankl wrote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." You have the power to choose how you respond. You are a product of your decisions, not your conditions. In

but hate rarely looks at the truth.

One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with "tripwires," signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. Think of the way that the low-fuel warning in your car lights up, grabbing your attention.

Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance!

Because day-to-day change is gradual, even imperceptible, it's hard to know when to jump. Tripwires tell you when to jump.

So how can you avoid letting these subtle emotions get the best of you? Get some distance.

One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The

If we want more moments of connection, we need to be more responsive to others.

self-evaluation involves interpretation, and that's where the Elephant intrudes.

To be clear, it's not so much that you're a brilliant predictor; it's that he's a lousy self-evaluator. We're all lousy self-evaluators.

Learn to recognize your own scripts. Play with them, poke at them, disrupt them.

The higher numbers get, the less sensitive we get to them, a phenomenon psychologists have labeled "psychophysical numbing.

Self-understanding comes slowly. One of the few ways to accelerate it—to experience more crystallizing moments—is to stretch for insight.

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

40% of U.S. adults do not always wash their hands after using the bathroom at home.

2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with may not have washed their hands between using the toilet and touching your hands.

The problem is that urgencies—the most vivid and immediate circumstances—will always hog our spotlight.

Stay alert to the promise that moments hold.