Quotes About Awareness

Where there are humans you'll find flies, and Buddhas.

Giddy grasshopper Take care...do not leap and crush These pearls of dewdrop

Upon hearing that all phenomena are but a reflection of the mind, their minds were suddenly opened and their spirits settled; they let go of what they had depended on and gained total freedom of action.

The scriptures are within yourself; [those that are written down] only point out what you have not been able to see on your own.

These things are endless. When you try fixing your mind on the places you contact with your eyes and ears, you'll find that everything between Heaven and Earth can become the seed of some resourcefulness. There is nothing under Heaven that cannot be said to be your teacher. Everything is important to you, so search it out. When there is absolutely nothing important enough for you to search out, there will be nothing left for you to receive from mankind.

When you gamble for tiles, you are skillful. When you gamble for your belt buckle, you begin to hesitate; and when you gamble for gold, you get confused. Your skill is the same, but you get cautious because you value something outside yourself. When you do this you become awkward inside." Lieh Tzu, Chapter 2

Being composed and being off-guard may look alike, but they are quite different. You should first test this out for yourself.

He that flatters you more than you desire either has deceived you or wishes to deceive.

Silence was never written down.

Illness tells us what we are.

One reads alone, even in another's presence.

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

Si conobbero. Lui conobbe lei e se stesso, perché in verità non s'era mai saputo. E lei conobbe lui e se stessa, perché pur essendosi saputa sempre, mai s'era potuta riconoscere così.

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.

Cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio.

Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.

All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.

La conoscenza del prossimo ha questo di speciale: passa necessariamente attraverso la conoscenza di se stesso.

KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden. POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence.