Quotes about Awareness

Then is then. Now is now. We must grow to learn the difference.

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

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?