Quotes About Awareness

octopuses, far more than rats and pigeons, have their own ideas:

What does it feel like to be an octopus? To be a jellyfish? Does it feel like anything at all? Which were the first animals whose lives felt like something to them?

if you focus on the large fossils, you miss most of the life that is present

seems plausible that an animal might feel pain or thirst without having an "inner model" of the world

The dream was ennobling but doomed. It was Malcolm's curse to see this before the most of the rest of us; it was the beginning of his sainthood that when black Americans reached that point--when they arrived, that is to say, at their blackness--Malcolm was already there.

Has it taught you to look at things different?' he asked. i thought, How does he know about all that? But i didn't have to ask him, because he just nodded toward his house. 'I bounce around them four walls a lot, Victor. I write some letters, I keep in touch with people. Putting your thoughts on paper, it makes you stop and notice stuff. Kind of slows you down.

Cuanto más nos preguntemos qué sucederá después, más atención prestamos. Y cuanta más atención prestemos, más escucharemos, percibiremos y retendremos.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.

Falling in love has been greatly overrated. Falling in love consists of 45 percent fear of not being accepted, 45 percent manic hope that this time the fear will be put to shame and a modest 10 percent frail awareness of the possibility of love. I don't fall in love any more. Just like I don't get the mumps.

Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

Some thoughts have glue on them.----Smilla

When you let your mind go blank,' he said, 'or when you stop talking for a long time, something happens. Time becomes different. It goes away. It doesn't come back until you start to say something.

Falling in love has been greatly overrated. Falling in love consists of forty-five per cent fear of not being accepted and forty-five per cent manic hope that this time the fear will be put to shame, and a modest ten per cent frail awareness of the possibility of love. [...] Falling in love is a form of madness. Closely related to hatred, coldness, resentment, intoxication, and suicide.

Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left.

For my part, I never talk to the child about time. We talk about other things -- though not about anything much -- and never about tomorrow. For me that is impossible. Tomorrow we could all be wiped out. You think back upon all the promises you did not manage to keep. Talk about time and you will always end up making promises. Then it is better to say nothing at all, no matter what.

SheAlmighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it. Best in the brief, unguarded moments when people were nearby but didn't yet know he was listening. So he waited by the window, as he was doing now.

What we discover in nature is not really a matter of what exists; what we find is determined by our ability to understand.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself. Cantor

deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive.

For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.' Mark 4:22.

in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice.

Even then one sensed that it must be a rule. That time could not be something that passed all by itself but was something one had to hold one to. And that, when one let go of it, that moment was very significant.

To touch time. That, I suppose, is what life for me has been about since then.