Awareness Quotes

The Big Message parts of this soaked right in. I read it quickly to proofread, slowly for understanding, then again to let it steep like tea… and again after stirring in a little milk of understanding and the sweet sugar of how poetry feels in the mouth…

Last year I began a 9/11 tradition of marking this day by starting or planting something good, to honor the dead while honoring life and new beginnings. This year I’m reaching for kindness.

Not long after Descartes’s birth, Shakespeare wrote “To be, or not to be,” the opening lines of one of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Here, Descartes is weighing doubt: to doubt, or not to doubt. Descartes was not as mixed up or self-involved as he may seem to us now. He was working through how we might go about a scientific…

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to…

Whether you see a staircase as heading up or down depends on where you are standing. It is your perception of the situation. The concepts you have based on your experience with staircases get mixed up in the way you…

Rumi was in his sixties. He had amassed a reported 10,000 students. The monk prostrated himself before Rumi. Rumi returned the honor and prostrated himself before the priest. Aghast, the young man fell to the ground again. This went on 32 times…

I was so surprised that I almost dropped my flute. I didn’t – wouldn’t that give Mom something to yell at me for if I broke it! – but I did muddle the tune. As soon as the music faltered – just like that, as though the only thing that was keeping her in this world was that tune – she…

Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived…

And yet if one would look down a deep well,
Even at noon, we might see these same stars,
Far fairer than the blinding blue: the Truth
Shines in the water like a dark bright eye…

“You seem to know as much as he does.” Janey said. “Why didn’t you start your own Order?”

“I thought about that,” Goninan said. “When I was young. But to acquire the position of power that Madden presently holds, I would have…”

She listened to the waves wash ashore, and the whistle of the wind as it bored through the hole in the longstone. The shingles shifted underfoot when she stepped closer. The moon was near to setting, but still visible in the…