Quotes about awareness
page 12

“Once a sage asked why scholars always flock to the doors of the rich, whilst the rich are not inclined to call at the doors of scholars. "The scholars" he answered, "are well aware of the use of money, but the rich are ignorant of the nobility of science."”

Al-Biruni (973–1048) Persian scholar and polymath

Quoted in: A.L. Mackay Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (London 1994).

Money, Science

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.”

Jean Genet book The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal (1949)

Birth, Perfection

“To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.”

Alex Steffen (1968) American writer and futurist

The GOOD Guide to COP15: The Fire this Time: Copenhagen and the War for the Future, 18 November 2009 http://www.good.is/post/The-GOOD-Guide-to-COP15-The-Fire-this-Time-Copenhagen-and-the-War-for-the-Future/,

Men, Future

“Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Ch. 4 http://www.resologist.net/talent04.htm Wild Talents (1932)

Lie, Feeling, Time, Joy

“But frankly—may I so speak?—your CIA people’s theory strikes me as a miserable bundle of random suspicions, a few separate facts strung together by an intricate structure of ad hoc theorizing, in which everyone is credited with enormous powers for intrigue. A much simpler view can be entertained with more common sense, and as a CIA employee you must be aware that, like all intelligence agencies, it lacks the faculty of common sense.”

Philip K. Dick book Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 8, (p. 123)

People, Intelligence, Sense

“In its extreme form self-awareness manifests itself in notions such as that of the soul, but in simple form it merely means to be aware of oneself as an individual among others.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins (1977)

Soul

“Gorymikine: Surely, he must be aware that Russia is facing a revolt!
Rachovsky: Perhaps…but let us hope, my dear Gorymikine that the Tsar will stand firm in his governance!
Gorymikine: No, my dear Rachkovsky he’ll follow whatever advice is easiest.
Rachikovsky: Well, I hear that Witte is talking him into “modernizing” Russia with a liberal bias!
Gorymikine: It will bring Russia down providing fuel to the fire. We must stop him at all costs!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp.23-24

Hope

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?…
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Interviewed by Eric Nordern, Playboy (September 1968)

Love, World, Religion, Star

“Yet all this is not ressentiment. These are only stages in the development of its sources. Revenge, envy, the impulse to detract, spite, *Schadenfreude*, and malice lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one's fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him “a piece of his mind,” or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence. Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear. Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion—and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious—or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality. If an ill-treated servant can vent his spleen in the antechamber, he will remain free from the inner venom of ressentiment, but it will engulf him if he must hide his feelings and keep his negative and hostile emotions to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Hostility, Fear, Feeling, Forgiveness

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women, Men, People, World

“You can only talk rubbish if you're aware of knowledge.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 2 Episode 6
On Sayings

Knowledge

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Wisdom, Secret, Feeling, Thinking

“I prefer character-driven stuff. I am an actor and I come from theater and I love creating a scene and working with actors as opposed as opposed to working with CGI. But there is some fun to be had with the B-movie monster movies as well especially today because they are so self-aware, you can have a lot of fun. But I definitely prefer the more straightforward horror.”

Griff Furst (1981) American actor, director and musician

SLIFF 2016 Interview: Griff Furst – Director of COLD MOON http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2016/10/slif-2016-interview-cold-moon-director-griff-furst/ (October 31, 2016)

Love

“Our ground today is not so much the national or the regional ground as it is the understanding of this single earth. The earth has been round for some time now, but not in man’s relation to man, nor in the understanding of the arts of each as a part of that roundness. As usual we have occupied ourselves too much with the outer, the objective, at the expense of the inner world wherein tie true roundness lies... America more than any other country is placed geographically to lead in this understanding., and if from past methods of behaviour she has constantly looked towards Europe, today she must assume her position, Janus-faced, toward Asia, for in not too long a time the waves of the Orient shall wash heavily upon her shores. All this is deeply related with her growth in the arts, particularly upon the Pacific slopes. Of this I am aware. Naturally my work will reflect such a condition and so it is not surprising to me when an Oriental responds to a painting of mine as well as an American or an European..”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Quote from Fourteen Americans, Mark Tobey, exhibition catalogue MOMA New York, 1946, p. 70
1940's

World, Art, Understanding, Nature

“Cancer – regardless of the type – is a disease that has touched every one of us through family or friends. It is my hope that in being candid about my battle, that i will raise awareness that will ultimately benefit others.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" Full Remarks: Governor Larry Hogan Announces Cancer Diagnosis http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/06/22/full-remarks-governor-larry-hogan-announces-cancer-diagnosis/"(22 June 2015)

Disease, Family, Hope

“Art can have a considerable influence on our own response to nature. It can enhance our vision, so that we become aware of a new and deeper meaning in what we see around us.”

Walter Thomas Monnington (1902–1976) British artist

Unsourced

Art, Nature

“It's such a simple thing, really. It's an awareness that the other people in the world are other people, and that you are one of them. That every time you have a chance to help somebody out, to do what's right instead of what you think you're supposed to do, you should do it.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

" Senior Convocation Speech http://www.news.cornell.edu/campus/Olbermann_speech.html," Cornell University (1998-05-23)

People, World, Thinking, Chance

“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)

Imagination, Learning, Time

“I was just always really into having pets and felt a real connection with animals, and I guess as I became aware … from where it was coming to my plate it's just I couldn't eat it—it was disgusting. I stopped eating read meat … but I still ate chicken for a long time, and we were on tour and saw a chicken truck go by with these chickens that were just bleeding—it was just disgusting. And that was it. I haven't had a piece of it since. … We're not actually born ready to eat meat, it's something you have to develop and it's not something that you need to develop. The issue with the whole thing is just education and information. You know, most people don't think about it.”

Chris Adler (1972) American drummer

“Lamb of God interview,” by Peta2.com, on YouTube (19 February 2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D91k1aOy1tY.

People, Education, Thinking, Time

“It was around 1910/11 that everyone, at every level of the social scale, became aware of those apparent eccentricities that were challenging the precarious certainties of the world. And it was uniquely the painting of a group, not of an individual, that was the cause.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

after 1920, The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form (1925)

World, Painting

“Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa.”

Elfriede Jelinek book The Piano Teacher

P 151
The Piano Teacher (1988)

Law, Music, Feeling, Question

“Learning is all that mass of facts, and of judgments on the facts, and of conclusions drawn therefrom; wisdom is the extracted essence of the whole, that which the Soul has gathered out of all these experiences, and it is, as you are aware, its work in Devachan to turn these experiences into wisdom.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

p. 55

Wisdom, Soul, Learning

“Human beings, having, above all creatures, received the power of reason… need to be aware where nature is unaware. Nature reaches its culmination in humans, but human consciousness has not its essence in itself or nature.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

As quoted in Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm (2009), "Linnaeus and homo religiosus," Universitet, p. 83.

Nature

“There is something radically wrong, [the anarchist] declares, in a system of society that functions and maintains its existence by the impetus of violence and force. He sees nothing praiseworthy in political society which has recourse to periodic wars, or need of jails, gallows and bludgeons--and it is because he is aware that these brutal weapons are the instruments of every government and State that he works for their destruction. … Unlike the politician, he does not regard dishonesty, brutality and avariciousness as natural characteristics of human nature, but as the inevitable consequences of coercion and frustration engendered by artificial law, he believes that these social evils are best eradicated not by greater penalties and further legislation, but by the free development of the latent forces of solidarity and sympathetic understanding which government and law so ruthlessly suppress. … Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it--for man can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule.”

George Nicholson (1760–1825) British anarchist and author

"The simplicity of anarchism" in Freedom, 1955. Reprinted in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 39-40.

War, People, Law, Penalty

“This Australia of ours is a vast island continent inhabited largely by people of British or other European stock and with a heritage of national freedom, personal liberty and the institutions of a British parliamentary democracy. But geographically we are part of Asia, and increasingly we have become aware of our involvement in the affairs of Asia. Our greatest dangers and our highest hopes are centred in Asia's tomorrows. Already one Asian country [Japan] has become established as the largest purchaser, in terms of money value, of Australian exports. The only military operations in which we are now engaged or in which we have been engaged since the Second World War are located in Asia.”

Harold Holt (1908–1967) Australian politician, 17th Prime Minister of Australia

address to federal parliament after returning from a tour of Asia, 12 April 1967
As prime minister
Source: http://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/original/00001559.pdf

Money, War, People, World

“Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as the healthy animal spirits of the mind, which come into exercise when the surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere survival. “Man is perfectly human,” said Schiller, “only when he plays.” And it is this awareness of an available surplus beyond the requirements of mere existence that his maxim conveys to us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as “idle curiosity”—but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

Life, Truth, Way, Exercises

“There are always alternative interpretations of the same data. It is often the case, however, that the alternatives that are rejected are treated as if they don't exist. But they do. And we should be aware not only of their existence and potential viability, but of the possibility that the hypotheses that we might embrace so strongly today may very well be the rejects of tomorrow.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

Preface
What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

“Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes. Still, most scientists and most historians would concur that the broad strokes I've sketched, when viewed from sufficient distance, are accurately rendered—that is, that science and history are each in pursuit of statements that represent the truths ascertained by their respective disciplines”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Howard Gardner (2011), Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter, p. 26-27

Truth, History, Science, Change

“The real choice is between obedience and expulsion. For this reason, there is a powerful tendency for people to want to believe that their thoughts and behavior at work are voluntary—the alternative, of perceiving the actual conflict, is simply too painful. Indeed, this struggle with conformity will be painful to the extent to which individuals are aware that it is real, to the extent to which they are aware of their own conflicting inner needs, thoughts and desires. A person will suffer more intensely the more he or she is strong and independent. Given the apparent hopelessness of resistance, there is a powerful and continuous incentive for individuals to become less aware of their own feelings, beliefs and needs. Indeed the only rational solution for an individual may often be to become dead inside, to become alienated from his or her feelings and desires.”

David Edwards (1962) british journalist, born 1962

Source: Burning All Illusions (1996), p. 36

Pain, People, Behavior, Feeling

“Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one’s own life is a case in point. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher

Philosophical Sketches, Ayer (1979)

Life, Death, Youth, Age

“In most men, the conscious and the unconscious being hardly ever make contact; consequently the conscious aim is to make himself as comfortable as possible with as little effort as possible. But there are other men, whom we have been calling, for convenience, ‘Outsiders’, whose conscious and unconscious being keep in closer contact, and the conscious mind is forever aware of the urge to care about ‘more abundant life’, and care less about comfort and stability and the rest of the notions that are so dear to the bourgeois.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Nine, Breaking the Circuit

Life, Men, Effort

“"Do you love him?" Maura asked curiously.
"I'd rather not," Blue replied.
"He has lots of negative qualities I can help you hone in on," her mother offered.
"I'm already aware of them. Infinitely."”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 82
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven King (2016)

Love, Help

“A healthy forest, untouched by forestry technology, is made up of a strange mixture of vegetation. Alongside well-defined areas of noble trees, conditions of apparent chaos can be found, which can best be described as irregular confusion. People who are not aware of the importance of the balance in Nature, of which the forest is a part, want to clear areas of everything they do not consider to be useful. A great deal of sensitive concern and observation is necessary to begin to understand why Nature depends on an apparently chaotic disorder.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger wrote in 1930
Living Water

People, Understanding, Nature, Tree

“The year 1967 gave us the feeling of the one-ness of Canada, until it was rudely jolted by de Gaulle and his insensate call for a "free" Quebec. That visit robbed the Centennial year of its high shine and made the people of the other nine provinces aware as never before of the crisis of Confederation.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 128

People, Feeling

“The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that -- as odd as it sounds -- one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in an idea, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. 'How can a yogi ever feel worried?... That question I have been expecting for a very long time!' (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) 'And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!' It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's 'self-image.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.
Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 150

People, Feeling, Idea, Question

“You write you could never be a Theosophist. Well I suppose I could say the same thing, if you're referring to what most theosophists are. But that does not alter the fact that I believe that the principles of theosophy are true, and that it leads to clarity in one's spiritual development. Which means that we [= Mondrian ànd the catholic painter and his former teacher L. Schelfhout, after their reconciliation] quite agree on this point. Self-awareness is, in my view, of crucial importance to all human beings. I can understand how the Catholic doctrine may lead to vagueness, but Theosophy, which is a spiritual science, can never do so.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In a letter to Lodewijk Schelfhout, Paris 29 January 1914; as quoted in 'Beeldende Kunst: Opmerkingen over de tentoonstelling van den Modernen Kunstkring.. Der Ploeg (1912)', W. Steenhoff, p. 147
1910's

Understanding, Teachers, Science

“It is impossible for me to say something foolish without being aware of it.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“The societal decision to reduce beef will profoundly affect the economics of human survival in the coming century. In the new world that is coming, millions of human beings will voluntarily choose to eat lower on the food chain so that millions of others may obtain the minimum food calories they need to sustain their lives. This grand redistribution of the earth's bounty, the most far-reaching in history, will unite the human race in a new fraternal bond. A new species awareness will begin where the rich meet the poor on the descending rungs of the world's protein ladder. The decision to eat further down on the planet's food chain will force a wholesale reassessment of the entire grain-fed meat complex ranging from factory farm chickens to hogs. The collapse of the global cattle complex will likely precipitate a chain reaction, resulting in the elimination of other grain-fed meats from the human diet. The dissolution of the commercial cattle complex will spare the rich and might help save the poor. Eliminating grain-fed beef and eating lower on the food chain will dramatically reduce the incidence of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), p. 290

World, Disease, Food, History

“The enlightened soul is a person who is self-conscious of his "human condition" in his time and historical and social setting, and whose awareness inevitably and necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Where Shall We Begin, 1997-2013, p. 1 ; as cited in: Robert Deemer Lee, Overcoming tradition and modernity: the search for Islamic authenticity, (11997), p. 127.

Soul, Sense, Time, Personality

“The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html (EWD340). 1970s

“There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set— quite appropriately— and said, “I’m sorry, Jim. When you’re directing, you don’t need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do.” And, you know, and I WOULD be there— behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn’t even aware of.”

James L. Brooks (1940) American director, producer and screenwriter

In the documentary Dreams on Spec

Way

“The picture of law triumphant and justice prostrate, is not, I am aware, without admirers. To me it is a sorry spectacle. The spirit of justice does not reside in formalities, or words, nor is the triumph of its administration to be found in successfully picking a way between the pitfalls of technicality. After all, the law is, or ought to be, but the handmaid of justice, and inflexibility, which is the most becoming robe of the latter, often serves to render the former grotesque. But any real inroad upon the rights and opportunities for defence of a person charged with a breach of the law, whereby the certainty of justice might be imperilled, I conceive to be a matter of the highest moment.”

James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance (1816–1899) British judge and rose breeder

Combe v. Edwards (1878), L. R. 3 P. D. 142.

Justice, Law, Way, Personality

“There is much to be said concerning retirement. Some men cannot survive it because they have not prepared themselves for it. For the man who has retained his curiosity, retirement in old age can be the most enjoyable period of his life; but he must be aware of the emptiness of public renown and desire the peace of obscurity; he must still have the wish to learn and understand; in his village, his garden, or his house, he must have some restricted personal occupation. The wise man, after having given all his time to his public activities, now devotes himself entirely to his personal affairs and development; and this will be easier for him if he has been able to interest himself in poetry and the beauties of nature, even during his busiest years. For myself, I cannot imagine a pleasanter old age than one spent in the not too remote country where I could reread and annotate my favorite books. "The mind," says Montaigne, "must thrive upon old age as the mistletoe upon a dead oak."”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Life, Men, Books, Age

“I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Love, Life, People, Truth

“I therefore think that I was right in trying from the outset of the Olympic revival to rekindle a religious awareness.”

Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937) Founder of modern Olympic Games, pedagogue and historian

Stated in the year before he died, as quoted in "The Olympics, Sports and Religion — Is There a Conflict?", in Awake! magazine (8 September 2000)

Thinking

“Has there ever been a musician of cultural significance who's been aware they're significant? Maybe it's a generation whose parents came from a working class environment and because they were rootless in a way, like me and him, they latched onto that as an identity. Maybe we romanticise what our parents wanted to escape from. We're, like, fantasising out a living.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

NME (New Musical Express), March 13, 2004
Music and politics

Way, Parent

“Speer never made the mistake of saying there were no extermination camps. He said he didn't know about them. He impressed the gullible by declaring himself willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes even though he was not aware of their full scope. But as the man better informed about the Reich's industrial resources than anybody else including Hitler, Speer was in fact fully aware of the purpose and the extent of the Final Solution and by pretending he was not he did the opposite of accepting responsibility.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Speer Checks Out'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“One young lady asserted that she had never looked at any of the cards in the cars in which she had been riding for years. When questioned further, it appeared that she knew by heart almost every advertisement appearing on the line (Chicago and Evanston line), and that the goods advertised had won her highest esteem. She was not aware of the fact that she had been studying the advertisements, and flatly resented the suggestion that she had been influenced by them. Some of the goods advertised were known to her only by these advertisements, yet she supposed that they had nothing to do with her esteem of the goods. She supposed that she had always known them, that they were used in her home, or that they had been recommended to her. She did not remember when she had first heard of them.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, 1908, p. 370-371

Cars, Home, Question, Study

“In principle, it might be possible to obtain evidence of focal-attentive processing in the absence of awareness of what is being processed… in practice, however, a complete dissociation of consciousness from focal-attentive processing is difficult to achieve.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Source: Is human information processing conscious?, 1991, p. 665; As cited in: Giorgio Marchetti, " Against the view that consciousness and attention are fully dissociable https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279725/." Attention and consciousness in different senses (2011): 23.

“The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals. The task of the Government is to facilitate this evolution, this progress. It must provide proper conditions and a proper climate for this purpose. While governing, the administrator must, therefore, keep certain trends in view. He should be aware of the policies which he has to implement and of the methods which are open to him for their implementation. He should know what the Government wants and at the same time be attuned to the needs of the people.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

People, Idea, Time

“Christ's mission is to release the divine into our conscious knowing. He awakens the impulse in humanity to rise above his lower nature and be aware of his higher nature that dwells within.”

Flower A. Newhouse (1909–1994) American mystic

Lecture, April 6, 1969 - Emmanuel, God with Us
Christ

Nature, Christ

“When we realize that we can see life we gradually give up the things that stand in the way of our complete awareness. As we paint we move along step by step. We realize that we are guided in our work by awareness of life.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

from her 1989 piece for 'Artspace', 'The Current of the River of Life Moves Us'
1980 - 2000

Life, Way, Painting

“The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. … No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 4.

Men, Truth, Secret, Nature

“For the Muslim, religion traditionally was not only universal but also central in the sense that it constituted the essential basis and focus of identity and loyalty. It was religion which distinguished those who belonged to the group and marked them off from those outside the group. A Muslim Iraqi would feel far closer bonds with a non-Iraqi Muslim than with a non-Muslim Iraqi. Muslims of different countries, speaking different languages, share the same memories of a common and sacred past, the same awareness of corporate identity, the same sense of a common predicament and destiny. It is not nation or country which, as in the West, forms the historic basis of identity, but the religio-political community, and the imported Western idea of ethnic and territorial nationhood remains, like secularism, alien and incompletely assimilated.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Religion, Feeling, Communication, Idea

“We affirm our position again against terror and violence. We will continue to fight the scourge of terrorism against humanity and reject the culture of extremism and violence in any form or shape, from whatever source or place, regardless of justifications or motives, being fully aware of their danger as a plague that threatens the peace and stability of the whole world.
We will use all the power of the law to prevent support reaching illegal organizations, including terrorist groups.”

Hosni Mubarak (1928) 4th president of Egypt

Address at a press conference, as quoted in "Mubarak : Arabs to fight 'scourge of terrorism'" at CNN (3 June 2003) http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/03/mubarak.transcript/index.html

World, Peace, Law, Motivation

“As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 23

Life, Books, Change

“What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.”

Michael Crichton book The Lost World

The Lost World (1995)

Food, Behavior, Question, Thinking

“Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 61.

People, Support

“The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 22 - Woman in the Aquarian Age (1971).

Women, Men, Dependency

“My thoughts are with the victims of this morning’s despicable, unprovoked attack on the Republican congressional softball team. Representative Scalise is a friend, and my heart goes out to him and his family. Steve and I wish him and the others wounded a speedy recovery. They remain in our thoughts and prayers. I also want to commend the heroic actions of the Capitol Police officers who clearly prevented today’s attack from being a much bigger tragedy. I am aware that the suspect recently made vile comments about me on social media. It also appears that the suspect targeted members of congress specifically because he disagreed with their views. We should not allow our political differences to escalate to violent attacks. We must all refuse to allow the politics of our country to be defined in this way. Now more than ever, we must unite as a one nation under God. It is incumbent upon all of us to work together in a civil and productive way, even when we disagree.”

Karen Handel (1962) American politician

Karen Handel’s Statement On Today’s Attack In Virginia https://karenhandel.com/karen-handels-statement-todays-attack-virginia/ (June 14, 2017)

God, Family, Way, Appearance

“To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Conclusion, p. 415
The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979)

Understanding, Memory, Time, Training

“In my search for these values I like to work both realistically and abstractly. In my drawing and painting I turn from one to the other as a necessity or impulse and not because of a preconceived design of action. When drawing what I see I am usually most conscious of the underlying principle of abstract form in human beings and their relationship one to the other. In making my abstract drawings I am most often aware of those human values which dominate the structure and meaning of abstract forms. Sculpture is the fusion of these two attitudes and I like to be free as to the degree of abstraction and realism in carving. The dominant feeling will always be the love of humanity and nature; and the love of sculpture for itself.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 285

Love, Feeling, Search, Nature

“The whole system of the Foreign Enlistment Act is, I may add, only 200 years old. The ancients did not know the meaning of the word "neutrality" as we know it at the present day. In the Middle Ages people were hardly aware of such a thing as neutrality; the first Foreign Enlistment Act is hardly 200 years old, and since that time that system of legislation has grown up. It has been a code of legislation that has gradually grown up, and is now looked to by the nations to assist in keeping the peace and preventing the catastrophe of a general war. Shall we be the first to roll back the tide of civilization, and thus practically go back to barbarism and the Middle Ages, by virtually repealing this international code by which we preserve the rights and interests of neutrality? I cannot but think that this House and the country, when they reflect on the facts of the case, will consider that if they in any way lend their sanction to such a retrograde policy, they would be unworthy of themselves, and would be guilty of a great crime against humanity.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1863/apr/24/observations in the House of Commons (24 April 1863). 1860s

War, People, Age, Peace

“So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they "had wives and families to support."”

Sinclair Lewis book It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

Family, Courage, Support, Teachers

“Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope—not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 1 (p. 10)

“Obviously, being on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills brought more awareness to Erika Jayne and brought her out of the clubs and into people’s living rooms. I’m very thankful for that. I have nothing but great things to say about my experience.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to Yahoo https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/erika-jayne-wants-people-to-forget-their-005915255.html?guccounter=1 (2016)

People

“I was literally waiting till I turned 18 so I could do that [nude posing] with PETA. It's something I was passionate about at a young age. I was educating my mom and sister, and encouraging as many people as possible not to eat meat and the reasons behind it. That poster is something I'm really proud I did to raise awareness for a cause I believe in. It's one of my proudest moments.”

Christian Serratos (1990) American actress

"Christian Serratos Interview" https://uk.askmen.com/hermanos/success/christian-serratos-interview.html, interview with AskMen (26 March 2014).

People, Age, Education, Moms

“Alchian: Two things you [Hayek] wrote that had a personal influence on me, after your Prices and Production, were 'Individualism and Economic Order' [sic — Alchian certainly has in mind Hayek's 'Economics and Knowledge'] and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society.' These I would regard as your two best articles, best in terms of their influence on me.
Hayek: 'Economics and Knowledge' — the '37 one — which is reprinted in the volume, is the one which marks the new look at things in my way.
Alchian: It was new to you, too, then? Was it a change in your own thinking?
Hayek: Yes, it was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. … I was aware that I was putting down things which were fairly well known in a new form, and perhaps it was the most exciting moment in my career when I saw it [i. e. 'Economics and Knowledge'] in print.
Alchian: Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that, because I had that copy typed up to mimeograph for my students in the first course I gave here [i. e. UCLA]. And Allan Wallace … came through town one day, and I said, 'Allan, I've got a great article!" He looked at it, started to laugh, and said, "I've seen it too; it's just phenomenal!' I'm just delighted to hear you say that it was exciting, because it was to me, too … that was a very influential article, I must say.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Interviewing Friedrich Hayek, 1978

Way, Knowledge, Thinking, Light

“Fear and love do not go together. Fear is constricting, self-centered and self-conscious, whereas love is expansive, selfless and directed towards service. To become effective spiritual warriors, we must learn to cultivate genuine love, courage, and compassion and come to depend on our inner faculties rather than externals. This allows us to understand our own true nature more deeply, and to behave more like the children and servants of God that we are. Then, firmly established in a higher state of consciousness, we can serve others-and the world-from the deepest, most aware and loving aspect of ourselves during these challenging times.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

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Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000)

Love, God, Children, World

“The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

A Conversation With Neal Stephenson http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ns67.htm

Science, Future

“If the prime minister was in the know of it, then he is equally culpable. If he was not aware, then it is for him to introspect as to what kind of government he is running.”

Arun Jaitley (1952–2019) Indian politician

On the Bofors scandal, as quoted in " Bofors: Cong distances from Quattrocchi http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-bofors-cong-distances-from-quattrocchi-1007289", DNA India (13 January 2006)

“With the massive amount of personal data on the Internet, Facebook nation has opened Pandora's box of total information awareness in the age of big data. Fortunately, Pandora's box released not only evil but also hope. … The hope is that good will trump evil.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

Age, Hope, Evil, Personality

“When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach.”

Elfriede Jelinek book The Piano Teacher

P159
The Piano Teacher (1988)

God, People, Star, Dance

“The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error – a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that ‘as the “lord of creation” man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.’ But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests – wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil. As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not. Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Faith of Puppets (p. 18-9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Truth, World, Religion, Dreams

“A mind is a psychic pattern through which you interpret and form reality. You have physical limbs that you can see. You have minds that are invisible. Each one can organize reality in a different fashion. Each one deals with its own kind of knowledge. These minds all work together to keep you alive through the physical structure of the brain. When you use all of these minds, then and only then do you become fully aware of your surroundings: You perceive reality more clearly than you do now, more sharply, brilliantly and concisely. At the same time, however, you comprehend it directly.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 763, Page 41
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979)

Fashion, Knowledge, Reality, Time

“Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee
any better melody in the April woods at dawn
than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake
o'night in his comfortless attic, might perchance
be aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch?”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Book I, lines 83-87.
The Testament of Beauty (1929-1930)

Music, Lying, Nature

“It was because of my faith and my pro-life conviction, but ultimately, it was because of my kids, I want to not just talk about my faith, but I want to live it out too. And a few years ago, some of the older ones [were] aware of Planned Parenthood and what occurs there, and so, I wanted to set the example for them and be a dad that they could be proud of”

Matt Birk (1976) Player of American football

Pro-life NFL star Matt Birk reveals real reason he skipped meeting with Obama https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-video-nfl-star-matt-birk-reveals-real-reason-he-skipped-meeting-w (April 15, 2016)

Life, Faith

“As you may be aware, the Government has been making genuine efforts to allay the fears and the suspicions of the minorities and if their (Hindu minority's) exodus from Sindh still continues, it is Not because they are not wanted here, but because they are more prone to listen to people across the border who are interested in pulling them out. I am sorry for those misguided people for nothing but disillusionment awaits them in their 'PROMISED LAND'.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Reply to an address of the Welcome Note presented by the Parsi Community of Sindh, Karachi on February 3, 1948

People, Fear, Effort

“I am so thrilled to be involved with PETA and taking a stance that I would rather be naked than wear fur, because I've always grown up with animals and I consider them my best friends, and for us to put them through so much torture and cruelty just for fashion I think is so horrific, and we need to raise the awareness because a person needs to learn to be comfortable in their own skin, not the skin of another animal.”

Shandi Finnessey (1978) American beauty queen, model, and television hostess

"Miss USA Winners Bare All and Say NO to Fur" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGM9mDRd0Cs, PETA video (June 13, 2013).

Fashion, Thinking, Learning, Animals

“As I look into the faces that fill this familiar room, and as I imagine those faces in other rooms across the land, I do not see members of the legislative branch or the executive branch or the judicial branch, though I am very much aware of the importance of keeping the separate but coequal branches of our Federal Government in balance. I do not see Senators or Representatives, nor do I see Republicans or Democrats, vital as the two-party system is to sustain freedom and responsible government.
At this moment of visible and living unity, I see only Americans. I see Americans who love their country, Americans who work and sacrifice for their country and their children. I see Americans who pray without ceasing for peace among all nations and for harmony at home.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, First Vice-Presidential address (1973)

Love, Children, Peace, Home

“Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginning-less, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Awareness and consciousness
Source: "I am That." P.29.

Sleep, Change, Parting

“(…) To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor not-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the mind-body is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror, it becomes a part of living.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Death
Source: I am That, P.122.

Death, Time, Parting

“The two-way street of Total Information Awareness is the road that leads to a more transparent and complete picture of ourselves, our governments, and our world.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

World, Way

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)

Communication, Water

“Next to worship and realization of God and the Lord Christ, awareness of the Angelic Kingdom has helped and inspired me more than any other single reality my recognition has touched.”

Flower A. Newhouse (1909–1994) American mystic

Rediscovering the Angels
Angels

God, Angels, Reality, Help

“The world suddenly opened up, and she was coming to new realizations and a greater awareness, concerning the nature of reality, and the world, which her mortal mind had previously been unable to conceive. She smiled her radiant goddess smile and began to laugh. Her omnipresent peals of mirth resonated through the forest, seeming to echo to the edges of the universe and back. She was getting her first glimpses of the world, seen through the eyes of a goddess; the first sweet tastes of a consciousness empowered beyond all human levels of comprehension, and her spirit was in exultant bliss.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from Forgotten Lore - Volume II.

World, Smile, Nature, Reality

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) American and French sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007:

Women, People, Art, Way

“Is the Minister aware that the recent publication "Over Here", produced by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, lists 157 such bases, not 66 that the hon. Gentleman mentioned? Will the hon. Gentleman assure us that this army of occupation of 30,000 personnel is not spying on any British citizens or political activities in this country? … Will the Minister further assure the House that the British Government have complete control over all activities in United States bases and that they will not allow those forces to deny civil liberties to people demonstrating outside them or to those who observe cruise missiles while they are touring around this country? Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House that it is time for the United States forces to leave this country and stop harassing British citizens and making Britain a nuclear aircraft carrier for the Pentagon?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/apr/26/united-states-forces in the House of Commons (26 April 1988). 1980s

People, Time, Housing, Country

“Security is an impostor; little can be achieved while each seeks his own freedom from want, from war, or from fear. The general nature of all fear is the awareness that development is threatened. Fear and its consequences can be eliminated only by action leading to continuous development. Action can bring the assurance of a development which is more welcome than either spiritual or material security. Only through the pursuit of a general development can the species acquire the unity of purpose which may, as one of its secondary consequences, eliminate unemployment and war. In the individual life the same is true: only in unitary development can fear be overcome. Every individual experiences countless shocks from his first breath to his last, and these challenges are necessary to his development. But a unitary tradition can assist the members of each maturing generation to turn these challenges to advantage and to retain their basic integrity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 256

Life, War, Fear, Nature

“I'm totally aware of how lucky I am. I have health, family, children. I do work that gives me total joy and allows me to make a living, and maybe, if I'm lucky enough, I'll feel I've fulfilled a little bit of service to society because I brought other people some laughter.”

Martin Short (1950) Canadian stand-up comedian

Parade Magazine; January 23rd, 2000

Children, People, Health, Family

“When a man is actually with God, and then sees what he has tried to do and in our terms done so marvellously. it amounts to something which is utterly inadequate. That's what I'm saying: that the steeple reaching up so far, far away, that Salisbury Cathedral has a beautiful steeple, but what is it compared with the sky into which it is reaching? It is in this comparison that one is aware of on the one hand the absurdity of our efforts, and on the other the inadequacy of them”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Interview with Bill Buckley

God, Beauty, Effort

“Most of us are aware and despairing on some level that our lives have become de-eroticized, that love and romance are not all around us but have to be hunted for with the kind of desperation that people used to bring when they went west looking for gold. But the answers that society gives us for this sexual desert are Viagra and Cialis and Levitra, products that allow us to stay hard for hours as we hump the indifferent mannequins we run into in bars. The country is lonely, self-obsessed and the individual members of the population are offered a thousand ways to improve their individual appearance and vigor. But there seems to be no solution on the horizon that anyone is offering to bring us more together, to give us the things we really need — love and acceptance and community.
We blame corporate America for this state of affairs because this ideology of individual acquisitiveness is the religion it naturally preaches. But it's our failure to come up with a competing ideology of getting along that's the real problem.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

"Finding Love in Electoral Politics", AlterNet (13 November 2004) http://web.archive.org/web/20041117195414/http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20486/

Love, People, Religion, Way

“Marc Goodman, global security advisor and futurist, spoke at the TEDGlobal 2012 in Edinburgh about his ominous warning: “If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us.” First source code, then genetic code. Transhumanists are well aware of that danger and are highly respectful of individual freedom and privacy in the new era of total information awareness.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

World, Freedom, Future

“For some time now it has been clear that intermedia art is trending toward that point at which all the phenomena of life on earth will constitute the artist’s palette. It is the purpose of this chapter to illuminate the direction of that trend and to cite a few pertinent examples. As with all other Paleocybernetic phenomena, the direction is simultaneously toward inner and outer space, the microcosm and the macrocosm. On the one hand, intermedia environments turn the participant inward upon himself, providing a matrix for psychic exploration, perceptual, censorial, and intellectual awareness; on the other hand technology has advanced to the point at which the whole earth itself becomes the “content” of aesthetic activity. The term “light show” must now be expanded virtually to include the aurora borealis, since hemispherical lumia displays are possible in the creation of artificial plasma clouds in space (see color plates), the launching of rockets to generate atmospherical events, or urban environmental generators such as Nicholas Schoffer’s monumental Cybernetic Light Tower, which transforms the skies of Paris into panoramic fantasias of color.”

Gene Youngblood book Expanded Cinema

Source: Expanded Cinema, 1970, p. 348; The Artist as Ecologist http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/11/the-artist-as-ecologist/

Life, Art, Color, Light

“People need to treat animals like they would treat a kid. You have to take care of it, make sure they are happy and they have anything they need. If you don’t have the time, then you don’t need an animal. … I want people to be aware of what is around them. Just because they don’t want to deal with it, doesn’t mean they can shut it out.”

Marlen Esparza (1989) boxer

"Olympic boxer Marlen Esparza is ready to fight animal cruelty" http://nbclatino.com/2013/01/29/olympic-boxer-marlen-esparza-is-ready-to-fight-animal-cruelty/, NBCLatino.com (29 January 2013).

Happiness, People, Time, Animals