Quotes about Attentiveness

So Ezra read it aloud from daybreak until noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate, in front of the men and women and those who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law.

It is only when the mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.

It's a phone call in the morning to pray about our day, a text-message to say I'm thinking of her, a handwritten note, a postcard when I'm out of town on business, remembering what drink she likes when we're at a bar, asking follow-up questions about her friends, and not hiding behind humor when it's time for a serious conversation.

Allow no sleep to your eyes or slumber to your eyelids.

Focus equals feeling.

When he turned around and saw me, he called out and I answered, ‘Here I am!’

The first duty of love is to listen.

If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.

Every time you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the Beloved, you will discover within yourself a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply. It is like discovering a well in the desert. Once you have touched wet ground, you want to dig deeper.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

One good way to listen is to listen with a sacred text: a psalm or a prayer, for instance. The Hindu spiritual writer Eknath Easwaran showed me the great value of learning a sacred text by heart and repeating it slowly in the mind, word by word, sentence by sentence. In this way, listening to the voice of love becomes not just a passive waiting, but an active attentiveness to the voice that speaks to us through the words of the Scriptures.

Though the LORD is on high, He attends to the lowly; but the proud He knows from afar.