Quotes About Awareness

The true self] rests in direct intuition. Therefore I said: "Better to abandon disputation and seek the true light."60

Chuang Tzu had an apt view on such quiet receptivity: "There is happiness in stillness.... If you are open to everything you see and hear, and allow this to act through you, even gods and spirits will come to you."6

was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I." But at this moment I came upon myself.Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist. Previously, I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.20

today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.6

As Chuang Tzu put it: "In the deep dark the person alone sees light."87

one must experience and know."33

So the learning of complete people is to return their essential nature to non-being and float their minds in spaciousness.41

The life of the spirit comes from the prior death of the mind. If people kill the mind, the original comes alive. Killing the mind does not mean quietism, it means undivided concentration.29

It's human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn't banging loudly on the door.

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.

The intelligence people at State were not the only ones who knew the French would have trouble. In Vietnam, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, De Gaulle's favorite general, landed to take charge of French forces. After a tour of the country he was fully aware of the political-military problems that lay ahead. Turning to his political adviser, Paul Mus, he said, "It would take five hundred thousand men to do it, and even then, it could not be done.

he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place.

In meditation, you can watch thoughts emerge from emptiness and return back to that emptiness. This leads first to the realization that you are separate from those thoughts, which we normally identify with self.

And so, there is nothing to practice because we are always already enlightened, always already Absence somehow open to the world.

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

It's the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.