Quotes About Awareness

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

It might be a Proustian slogan: n'allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.

To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It's almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and sadness - and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love.

Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation.

I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

what all books might do for their readers—namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

We appreciate beauty more when we are aware of life's troubles. — 8. Henri Fantin-Latour, Chrysanthemums, 1871

So, in what ways are you mad?

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully ) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...

As David lifted a suitcase onto the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well.

We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations.

Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued: In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. the writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

Als we ons met de instelling van de reiziger [met ontvankelijkheid als voornaamste kenmerk] door onze eigen omgeving bewogen, zou deze wellicht niet minder interessant blijken dan de hoge bergpassen en de oerwouden vol vlinders in Humboldts Zuid-Amerika.

How seldom we notice rooftops; how easily our eyes are drawn to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church.