Quotes About Awareness

While you are looking at the stars tonight, I want you to reflect on two koans. The first one is this: out of nowhere, the mind comes forth. And the second: show me your original face, the one you had before your parents were born.

You suppose you are the trouble But you are the cure You suppose that you are the lock on the door But you are the key that opens it

Frances made a tremendous effort not to comment on his height, as she knew from her six-foot friend Jen that tall people were well aware they were tall.

there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn't close your heart completely, but you couldn't leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes.

They should move gingerly through their days, as if they had spinal cord injuries.

At one point in the book, Susi says that, in Australia, one woman dies every week because of domestic violence. In the United States, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day. Every nine seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted or beaten. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women—more than that caused by car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.

Grandchildren would be her second chance to get it right. Now she had the time and the eggs to spare, and she would be present with her grandchildren. When she looked at photos of her children when they were little, she sometimes thought, Did I notice how beautiful they were? Was I actually there? Did I just skim the surface of my entire damned life?)

At last we had someone to blame for our miseries. Cadres, workers, soldiers, intellectuals, and peasants, people of all different degrees of political awareness.

I should never be left alone with my mind for too long.

Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find.

I know because I read...Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.

To those who will see, the world waits.

Approaching human life from the neutral sea was beginning to make me more appreciative.

One's happiness depends less on what he knows than on what he feels.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

He who says he hates all kinds of flattery, and says so in earnest, has undoubtedly not as yet become acquainted with all kinds of it, whether in substance or in form.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

The lowest classes, although they do not think it worth while to write down what they perceive, do nevertheless perceive and feel all that would have been worth the noting. The difference between the masses and the man of learning often consists in no more than a kind of apperception, or in the art of putting things into expression.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.