Quotes About Presence

Just as God was with the people of the first Christmas in their scary situations, He is with us. — Scoti Springfield Domeij

You know, when someone has been crying, something gets left in the air. It's not something you can see or smell, or feel. Or draw. But it's there.

So. So. So here I am." And there it is, he thought. For

There is a way of living in the world that is not here, although it seems to be. You do not change appearance, though you smile more frequently. Your forehead is serene; your eyes are quiet.

They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.

Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world.

Par l'imagination nous abandonnons le cours ordinaire des choses. Percevoir et imaginer sont aussi antithétiques que présence et absence. Imaginer c'est s'absenter, c'est s'élancer vers une vie nouvelle.

The shadow had followed behind them, clinging to their steps; and the two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down, trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky.

Nobody could see the ghost in his box, but everybody could hear him.

They had felt his breath . . . Yes, the ghost was there, around them, behind them, beside them. They sensed him without seeing him. They heard him breathing - so close to them, so close!

There's no such thing as a minor lapse of awareness. You're either present with what is--right here, right now--or you're someplace else.

always squinting around the corner for the future that is already with us, at our ease, elsewhere

A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

You can't be stuck if you're not trying to get anywhere. Which, to me, means that when you stop fighting with the way things are, magic happens. You relax, open, and any action you take comes from alignment with what's true.

When you don't want to be where you are, you create suffering for yourself. Change happens through acceptance, kindness and relaxation--not resistance, not warfare, not fights.

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now.

Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else. Being constantly agitated—another word for nonaccepting—about the inevitable. Being in a relationship with someone and refusing to surrender to the love because you don't want to give yourself to something you will eventually lose.

Take yourself in. Ask the questions no one ever asked you. Keep going until you know the answer and you know who's asking. Until you realize- it's not far away- that the essence of you, like the sky, was always here. You just happened to get distracted by the local weather for a few decades.

When we're convinced we have to earn joy, we don't notice the ten thousand places in which it is already waiting, asking, waving for our attention.

hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

You miss the life that happens in the middle zone—between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you'd rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

Wake up to the riot of life around you every second. The singer Pearl Bailey said, "People see God every day; they just don't recognize Him.

let me remember to pay attention to the ordinary, not just to the extraordinary.

In the silence, nothing was fragmented. There were no separate strands to gather together, to fumble, to complete for attention. In the silence, all of that fell away, and there was only what was here, and what was to be done.