Quotes About Awareness

This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite in excusable: not only did she stand unncessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face. ("Snowing in Greenwich Village)

While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him — so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.

We all rather live under wraps, don't we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn't it?

Weeds don't know they're weeds.

Green tree. Pretty lady. Car. Car. Truck," she recites, naming out loud almost everything she sees. "Don't mind me, I'm a gabberbox," she chuckles. "A gabberbox?" I ask, confused at her term. "You know, hon, I talk a lot," she explains before breaking into a laugh that is eerily familiar.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

if we were lucky enough to be living a good life, we should recognize this gift and thank God for it by looking out for others who need our help in breaking out of the cycle of poverty.

What struck me first was the UN's estimate that 850 million people in the world lacked basic literacy. I had to read the number three times to convince myself that it was not too large to be true. The world's population was around 6 billion people. That meant one out of every seven human beings lacked the ability to read or write a simple sentence.

So often we fail to acknowledge what we have because we're so concerned about what we want.

Alertness, the ability to be constantly observing, absorbing, and learning from what's going on around you, is a critical component for the individual in charge, the leader who strives for continuous improvement. You must constantly be awake, alive, and alert in evaluating yourself as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and your competitors.

You and I must accept some accountability for future bloodshed if each and every day we don't do something in our own way to alleviate prejudice in ourselves or others.

You often find what you're looking for.

It's good to know who hates you, and it's good to be hated by the right people.

You can close your eyes to the things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to the things you don't want to feel.

They say the world used to be bigger. The world's still the same--there's just less in it.

For the last twenty minutes, having something to do, he had become himself again, had come to earth from that unsafe country of the brain

he walks into the hall and the old walls there settle into place all around him and say something to him, the same way they always have, he thinks, it's always like that, whether he notices it and thinks about it or not the walls are there, and it is as if silent voices are speaking from them, as if a big tongue is there in the walls and this tongue is saying something that can never be said with words ...

Close the book. Read the title. Read the title again. Nuff said.

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, "Now what?

Awareness is not the same as thinking. It is a complementary form of intelligence, a way of knowing that is at least as wonderful and as powerful, if not more so, than thinking.

Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.

Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. A the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope).

To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in; long enough to actually feel the present moment, to see it in its fullness, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know and understand it better.