Quotes about Awareness

Do not look back on happiness, or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated out of it.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

Now is all we have. Everything that has ever happened to you, and anything that is ever going to happen to you, is just a thought.

Today, well lived, will prepare me for both the pleasure and the pain of tomorrow.

Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?

Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.