This page of quotations about awareness include insightful words from many great minds. If you’re looking for inspiring thoughts or thought-provoking perspective, check out these quotations on awareness.
Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom, courage, and compassion the authority to do so.
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Differences challenge assumptions.
What if Life simply wants us to emerge into the awareness that we are already enough?
People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.
When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.
Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
Very few people really see things unless they’ve had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.
The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
There is no freedom like seeing myself as I am and not losing heart.
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
To think and to be fully alive are the same.
Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
To be awake is to be alive.
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
We don’t have to surrender our individuality to experience the world as an extended self and its story as our own extended story. The liver, leg, and lung that are ‘mine’ are highly distinct from each other, thank goodness, and each has a distinctive role to play. The larger ‘selfness’ we discover today is not an undifferentiated unity. As in all living systems, intelligence depends on the integrative play of diversity. Diversity is a source of resilience. This is good news because this time of great challenge demands more commitment, endurance, and courage than any one of us can dredge up out of our own individual supply. We can learn to draw on the other neurons in the neural net and view them with gratitude. The acts and intentions of others are like seeds that can germinate and bear fruit through our own lives, as we take them in and dedicate that awareness to the healing of our world.
I consider myself fortunate to live in these times. To be alive in this wonderful self-organizing universe, involved in the dance of life with the senses to perceive, with lungs to breathe, with organs that can obtain their nourishment — this is a miracle for which there are no words. Furthermore, it is an incredible privilege that we have been given human life with a self-reflective consciousness that makes us aware of our own actions and enables us to make decisions. Now is the time we human beings can decide to consciously and actively participate in this dance of life.
Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence;
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And Tomorrow is only a Vision;
But Today well lived makes every
Yesterday a Dream of Happiness, and every
Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn.
There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn’t, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.
‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’ — says my pride, and remains adamant. At last — memory yields.
We are cursed with the blessing of consciousness and choice, a two-edged sword that both divides us and can help us become whole. But choosing wholeness, which sounds like a good thing, turns out to be risky business, making us vulnerable in ways we would prefer to avoid.
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in the magic will never find it.
A key to developing the capacity for inner awareness is the ability to differentiate felt energy in the body from thought, stories or interpretations. This ability to differentiate brings a more open, free inner space so we can more readily feel our authentic experience.
Mindfulness is the awareness that arises out of intentionally paying attention in an open, kind, and discerning way.
If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.
We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
