276 Awareness Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I know on which side my bread is buttered.

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

She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not - like a sound agnostic.

Much like a subtle spider which doth sit In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide; If aught do touch the utmost thread of it, She feels it instantly on every side.

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?

I looked at the high walls where once-white paint had grayed and then peeled. Barbara had always said the house had good bones, and she was right about that; but it had no heart, not with us living inside it. In place of laughter, trust, and joy, there was a hollow emptiness, a kind of rot, and I marveled at my blindness. Was it the alcohol, I wondered, that had made it bearable? Or was it something else, some inner failing? Maybe it was neither. They say that if you drop a frog into boiling water, he'll hop right out. But put the same frog into cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and he'll sit quietly until his blood begins to boil. He'll let himself be cooked alive. Maybe that's how it was for me. Maybe I was like that frog.

I desire to have both heaven and hell ever in my eye, while I stand on this isthmus of life, between two boundless oceans.

I could see things turning into a nasty tailspin. And then I thought, Maybe I'm slow, but this is ridiculous. Fuck it, just stop! So I stopped everything for the better part of a year. I guess I just reached a point where I said, 'Jesus Christ, what am I doing? Life is fucking good. What am I doing to myself?' Now I drink a glass or two of red wine and that's it. (2004)

I've never looked through a keyhole without finding someone was looking back.

Look at you, you madman! Screaming you are of thirst and dying as if you are in a desert, when all around you there is nothing but water.

'Make black history every day, I don't need a month.'

I read sometime around 1938 of Jewish fines and some street actions against them. But I was too concerned with U-Boats and the naval problems to be concerned about Jews.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

The protection he relied on for nearly thirty years was based on just two things. The same two things anybody uses to protect against any danger. The same way a nation protects itself against an enemy missile, the same way an apartment dweller protects himself against a burglar, the same way a boxer guards against a knockout blow. Detection and response. Stage one, stage two. First you spot the threat coming in, and then you react to it.

Obviously I watched the movies and the TV shows, but I guess I wasn't aware how deeply the influence was affecting me.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. (p. 34e)

Turn up the lights - I don't want to go home in the dark.

One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.

Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened - I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration - almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it. It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality.

When you are no more, only then for the first time will you be.

A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point.

He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked.

Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?

(Hawthorne Abendsen) told us about our own world. This, what's around us now. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment.

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).

Overhead, capricious spring clouds began to scud across the sky in mackerel shapes, promising more rain. Garraty turned up his collar and listened to the sound of his feet pounding the pavement. There was a trick to that, a subtle mental adjustment, like having better night vision the longer you were in the dark. This morning the sound of his feet had been lost to him. They had been lost in the tramp of ninety-nine other pairs, not to mention the rumble of the halftrack. But now he heard them easily. His own particular stride, and the way his left foot scraped the pavement every now and then. It seemed to him that the sound of his footfalls had become as loud to his ears as the sound of his own heartbeat. Vital, life and death sound.

There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time ago - no man can recall how far back - the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemorality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

But this means that we also need to build our home and make it strong and well protected. We see, after all, what is going on in the world. 'The Comrade Wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone, it seems.'

He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.

'Wake up!'

... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. ...

Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, / and clear in wanting

...the Lot's knowledge of the country's torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there.

I smell a rat.