Quotes About Awareness

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

I try not to think about how easily I slipped through a crack in the floor. It's like, if you were walking down the street with your friends, and suddenly one of them slipped down an open manhole, you'd notice, wouldn't you? I certainly would! I mean . . . I think I would. I hope I would. Or maybe we're all so focused straight ahead, people slip away when we're not looking.

I felt that lightning bolt you feel when someone speaks a hard truth you've always known but never heard anyone say out loud.

How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us.

I know why men lose sight of the face of God: because it is so close.

She never thought she was that kind of girl; now she knew there wasn't any other.

we cannot see what is "out there" merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible.

We suffer, ironically, from our indifference to those among us who suffer.

There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world's toxicity and begins to die.

does it mean to listen to a voice before it is

when we live behind a wall, our inner darkness cannot be penetrated by the light that is in the world. In fact, all we can see "out there" is darkness, not realizing how much of it is of our own making! As a young man, the wall allowed me to cast my own darkness on others while remaining blissfully ignorant of how they saw me.

Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.

A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.

How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

As a white, male American who has always been well-off—the kind of person for whom this nation has always worked best—the gift of full citizenship, unquestioned and unchallenged, came to me as an accident of birth. Today I realize the magnitude of that gift. But for years I was an unconscious and ungrateful recipient because attaining citizenship required no effort from me.

Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one's mind and one's feelings.

it is disconcerting to learn that while 73 percent of Americans can name the Three Stooges, only 42 percent can name the three branches of government.6

we all live at the intersection of our small worlds and the big one around us. If we want to serve others, we must attend to both.

if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment.

Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing.

There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does -- maybe more.

people may not notes the smallest things. but with out the smallest of things like kindness. we would all know

This is the hour of silence. In no way does silence mean lack of sound: it means a state in which the ear is the most alert.

Na cólera, os nossos ouvidos deixam de ouvir.