Quotes About Awareness

We lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.

Jean would be conscious of a curious feeling that he was living simultaneously in the immediate presence of a particular day and in other similar days of long ago.

perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as int a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.

To know a thing does not enable us, always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power to control them

Mas uma lembrança, um pesar são coisas móveis. Dias há em que se vão para tão longe que mal os distinguimos e os julgamos desaparecidos. Começamos então a atentar noutras coisas.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

timpul meu nu-i chiar atît de pre?ios; cel care l-a f?cut, nu ni l-a vîndut.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquillity.

By the time one wants to remember how one began to love a woman, one is already in love; during earlier reveries, one did not say to oneself, "this is the beginning of love, I must pay attention," and the feelings crept up on us almost unnoticed.

Per vaim rectam,

I was awakened by the blare of a regimental band which passed every day beneath my windows. But on several occasions — and I mention these because one cannot properly describe human life unless one shews it soaked in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after night, sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea — the intervening layer of sleep was strong enough to bear the shock of the music and I heard nothing.

But, just as we are devoid of that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as close the concerned attention of people who, on the contrary, never give us a thought, and not suspecting that during this same time we are the sole preoccupation of others.

Benim nazar?mda bir hiç oldu?unu zannetti?im ?ey, demek ki asl?nda bütün hayat?m, her ?eyimdi. ?nsan kendini ne kadar az tan?yor!

L'habitude de penser empêche parfois d'éprouver le réel, immunise contre lui, le fait paraître de la pensée encore.

it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that his companion is mad

It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself.

Hurry up; there's no time to be lost; don't forget, it's Saturday!

For mental uncertainty is even more of an obstacle to clear visual perception than a physical defect of the eye would be.

A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift.

A grande modificação que provoca em nós o despertar consiste menos em introduzir-nos na vida clara da consciência que em fazer-nos perder a lembrança da luz um pouco mais tamisada em que repousava a nossa inteligência, como no fundo opalino das águas.

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.

Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.

Na realidade, todo leitor é, quando lê, o leitor de si mesmo. A obra não passa de uma especie de instrumento óptico oferecido ao leitor a fim de lhe ser possível discernir o que, sem ela, não teria certamente visto em si mesmo. O reconhecimento, por seu foro íntimo, do que diz o livro, é a prova da verdade deste [...].

All this had been a source of pleasure to me, but that pleasure had remained hidden; it was one of those visitors who wait before letting us know that they are in the room until all the rest have gone and we are by ourselves.