Selected awareness quotes

1. Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it....

2. What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

3. We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

4. Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.

5. A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.

6. Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

7. Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

8. No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

9. The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

10. My problems aren't big but it doesn't necessarily take a big problem to kill me.

11. Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

12. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

13. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

14. Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

15. Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact.

16. When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.

17. Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

18. Most of us don't know about happiness until it's over.

19. How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

20. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

21. Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

22. The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

23. The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss.

24. We see time's furrows on another's brow, And death intrench'd, preparing his assault; How few themselves in that just mirror see!

25. Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.

26. Can any man say with certainty that he was happy at a particular moment of time which he remembers as being delightful? Remembering it certainly makes him happy, because he realizes how happy he could have been, but at the actual moment when the alleged happiness was occurring, did he really feel happy? He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried.

27. Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

28. There is nothing that sharpens a man's senses so acutely as to know that bitter and determined enemies are in pursuit of him night and day.

29. It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.

30. One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

31. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

32. Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

33. In this dim world of clouding cares, We rarely know, till wildered eyes See white wings lessening up the skies, The angels with us unawares.

34. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

35. The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

36. Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.

37. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

38. I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.

39. I know on which side my bread is buttered.

40. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

41. We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard...

42. Our minds are circumscribed by our immediate reality but we stop short at the thought of it.

43. 'Rock N Roll Nigger': Look around you, all around you Riding on a copper wave Do you like the world around you? Are you ready to behave?

44. And the eyes of the world are watching now.

45. There still are people who will come up to you and say: 'Science Fiction? Ha! Why read that?!' The most direct, off-putting reply is: Science fiction is the most important fiction ever invented by writers. It saw a whole mob of troubles pouring toward us across the shoals of time and cried, 'Head for the hills, the dam is broke!' But no one listened. Now, people have pricked up their ears, and opened their eyes.

46. And they say there's no global warming but right now the North Pole is a pool...there's things just floating away. Right now we are beyond global warming, at this point we are cooking. It's 105 in the middle of the country, and people come up to you and say, 'Is it hot enough for you?' I'm like 'No, my man, I want the sweat to roll down the crack of my ass like Niagara. Yeah, I want my man-titties to lactate, my man.'

47. ..the overemphasis on the Baconian doctrine of knowledge as power, and the accompanying concern with gaining power over nature as well as over ourselves in the sense of treating ourself as objects to be manipulated rather than human beings whose aim is to expand in meaningful living, have resulted in the invalidation of the self. This tends to shrink the individual's consciousness, to block off his awareness, and thus play into...unconstructive anxiety...I propose that the aim of education is exactly the opposite, namely, the widening and deepening of consciousness. To the extent that education can help the student develop sensitivity, depth of perception, and above all the capacity to perceive significant forms in what he is studying, it will be developing at the same time the student's capacity to deal with anxiety constructively.

48. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession.

49. Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.

50. You are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are.

51. Why is it we don't always recognize the moment when love begins, but we always know when it ends?

52. Within the body there are billions of different particles. Similarly, there are many different thoughts and a variety of states of mind. It is wise to take a close look into the world of your mind and to make the distinction between beneficial and harmful states of mind. Once you can recognize the value of good states of mind, you can increase or foster them.

53. The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

54. Good-breeding is opposed to selfishness, vanity, or pride. Never weary your company by talking too long or too frequently.

55. I remember feeling this way, you can lose it without knowing. You wake up one day and you don't notice which way the wind is blowing.

56. You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams. You follow the leader into the trees. And what's in there waiting, neither one of us knows, you gotta keep one eye open the further you go.

57. Look here, I often feel the same in more than one respect - not just in financial things, but in art itself, and in life in general. But do you think it's anything exceptional? Don't you think every man with a little spirit and energy has those moments? Moments of melancholy, of distress, of anguish - I think we all have them to a greater or lesser extent, and it is a condition of every conscious human life. It seems that some people have no consciousness of self. But for all that, those who have it may sometimes be in distress, they are not unhappy, nor is the distress anything exceptional.

58. Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are 'free' only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.

59. I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

60. We take no note of time but from its loss.

61. 'There be no shelter here! The frontline, is everywhere.'

62. 'One must forget many cliches in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. ... insight is knowledge at first sight.' - The Prophets, Introduction

63. UNICEF does amazing work. I thought I was a worldly person, and then I started working with them and realized I don't know as much of my world as I need to. And if I don't know as much about my world as I need to, then many, many, many people don't. So I'm thrilled to be in a position to be able to talk about it. And so I'm gonna. -''FLY (online) magazine, November, 2005 issue

64. '[Being a drug addict] is like making love to a gorilla, you don't stop 'till the gorilla is done...' - from VH1's Behind the Music: Megadeth

65. This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can't perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews - all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.

66. I think it is fairly clear why none of us do experience something beyond the mere watching. There may be rare moments of an emotional state in which we see, as it were, the clarity of the sky between clouds, but I do not mean anything of that kind. All such experiences are temporary and have very little significance. The questioner wants to know why, after these many years of watching, he hasn't found the deep waters. Why should he find them? Do you understand? You think that by watching your own thoughts you are going to get a reward: if you do this, you will get that. You are really not watching at all, because your mind is concerned with gaining a reward. You think that by watching, by being aware, you will be more loving, you will suffer less, be less irritable, get something beyond; so your watching is a process of buying. With this coin you are buying that, which means that your watching is a process of choice; therefore it isn't watching, it isn't attention. To watch is to observe without choice, to see yourself as you are without any movement of desire to change, which is an extremely arduous thing to do; but that doesn't mean that you are going to remain in your present state. You do not know what will happen if you see yourself as you are without wishing to bring about a change in that which you see. Do you understand?

67. Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do

68. In their ignorance, they were happy

69. But she could see that she had wounded him. He had been stupid, but he was smart enough to recognize the fact

70. To be cut off from the land of the living, and yet not to be dead. How could I bear that? That's how most men live, and don't even know it

71. I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew

72. His eyes stayed open. Seeing nothing. Seeing everything

73. Arcadia? The realm of the infinite? It's a poet's corner... It's not a cult or a religion - it's an awareness of your surroundings; you're not going to force yourself on anyone and, equally, no one's going to force themselves on you. And it's about community and pleasure. It came from a whisper through the trees. It came from a crack in the pavement. It can also come when you open a bag of crisps, or when you kick a football against a goalpost. Even if I was winding you up, it would still be true, because Arcadia and the Arcadian Dream is so deep, is so true to our hearts... It can be as powerful as your imagination can allow it to be. But, it can also be as dark and twisted as your soul... Arcadia encompasses the infinite, and that's why it comforts me.

74. Keep your head up, legs closed, eyes open/either a nigga wear a rubber or he die smokin'/I'm hearin' rumors so you need to switch/and niggas wouldn't call you bitch

75. Latet anguis in herba.

76. DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE!!!???

77. You know I'm gay?

78. Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

79. It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

80. Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

81. Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

82. Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

83. Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam.

84. Your denial is beneath you, and thanks to the use of hallucinogenic drugs, I see through you.

85. When blimp photographs are taken of giant stadia packed full of rock-concert or football fans, we get an idea of what 100,000 people look like. We all think of Hiroshima as the worst single killing of humans by humans. That was about a 75,000-capacity-coliseum-full. Each day of each year, year after year, a 75,000-capacity-stadiumfull of around-the-world humans perish from starvation or its side effects, despite an annual average 5-percent world food-production overage of the amount of food adequate for the total world's population. This daily kill of innocents dwarfs the awful Auschwitz killing.

86. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

87. The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

88. If we cannot 'practice the presence of God,' it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

89. Do you know at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity if you so desire?

90. When a man has fulfilled all four of these requisites- to be wide awake, to have fear, respect, and absolute assurance- there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his actions lose the blundering quality of the acts of a fool. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.

91. I couldn't do them if I didn't know horses lived behind them.

92. You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.

93. You still don't know what you do well.

94. Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.

95. And suppose that you lived In that forest in France Where the average young person Just hasn't a chance To escape from the perilous Pants eating plants!

96. I was walking through the park... plucking out nose hairs. Oh, those sleeping winos HATE that.

97. It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.

98. Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.

99. There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

100. Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.