Quotes About Awareness

life is more than intelect

Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything.

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.

In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

I don't know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.

Denial couldn't be maintained.

One thing we've noticed is these days people see all kinds of things they don't want to see, so they go blind." "Selectively blind.

A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don't even realize it. They're opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They're opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world's gone weird.

to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...

The secret is not to think, we think in words. And what lies beyond the reality we see is a truth that words can't contain, the secret is to feel.

Her imagination was such that she could hear the song of the bird when it was still but a yolk in an egg.

In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes.

When a liar became too skilled at deception, he could lose the ability to discern the truth, and could himself be more easily deceived.

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things.

Strange how the deepest part of us isn't able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.

People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren't expecting to see them.

With time, however, life had become too real

Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.

To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself—always, always, always—and is at last recognized, because there's so damn little of it.

This isn't a stupid horror movie, odd one. It's never too late to do the intelligent thing.

In my bones, I know that I am not long for this world.

our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past.

Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it...