Quotes about Awareness

Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don't want to know the pain.

Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.

The great movement of the spiritual life is from a deaf, nonhearing life to a life of listening.

I witness many signs of hope. I don't have to wait until all is well, but I can celebrate every little hint of the Kingdom that is at hand.

Silence is the discipline that helps us to go beyond the entertainment quality of our lives.

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses.

Our individual as well as communal lives are so deeply molded by our worries about tomorrow that today hardly can be experienced.

Spiritual reading, therefore, is slow, deliberate, meditative reading in which we allow the words to penetrate our heart and question our spirit.

we are usually surrounded by so much inner and outer noise that it is hard to truly hear our God when he is speaking to us.

it became increasingly clear to me that I know quite well the difference between darkness and light but do not always have the courage to name them by their true names.

When we are spiritually deaf, we are not aware that anything important is happening in our lives. We keep running away from the present moment, and we try to create experiences that make our lives worthwhile. So we fill up our time to avoid the emptiness we otherwise would feel.