Awareness is the foundation of personal growth and meaningful change. It allows us to understand ourselves and the world around us more deeply. In this collection of 82 powerful awareness quotes, you'll find inspiring words that encourage mindfulness, self-reflection, and a greater sense of presence in everyday life. Whether you're seeking motivation or a fresh perspective, these quotes offer valuable insights to help you stay conscious and connected.
1. “I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .” - Kurt Vonnegut
2. “The WakingI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?I hear my being dance from ear to ear.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to doTo you and me, so take the lively air,And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.What falls away is always. And is near.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I learn by going where I have to go.” - Theodore Roethke
3. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” - David Foster Wallace
4. “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” - Malcolm X
5. “Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.” - Anthony de Mello
6. “Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding, to be more aware? To be more alert, to be more alive?” - Osho
7. “The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:"This is water.""This is water."It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.” - David Foster Wallace
8. “An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. ” - Anthony Standen
9. “Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.” - Annie Dillard
10. “These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.” - Anthony de Mello
11. “While performing the great majority of the actions in their life, people are totally unaware. We tend to go through our daily activities mechanically. We talk without real purpose. We do things without even knowing that we do them. We are not really present to what we are doing. Even if we practise being aware, entire portions of our days can elapse before we retrieve our thread of awareness. In short, we are not living our life, we are sleeping it.” - Samuel Sagan
12. “You never know. Maybe when we’re dreaming…we’re more lucid than when we are awake.” - Katherine Angela Yeboah
13. “Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.” - John Henry Newman
14. “This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.” - Vaclav Havel
15. “Moments of splendor and moments of gloom – they help maintain life’s balance. One thought is key: they all pass...” - Joan Marques
16. “Awakened at midnightby the sound of the water jarcracking from the ice” - Basho
17. “Awareness is the enemy of sanity, for once you hear the screaming, it never stops.” - Emilie Autumn
18. “Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.” - Franz Winkler
19. “Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.” - Anthony de Mello
20. “[W]e must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.” - George Eliot
21. “The world is right because I feel good.p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990” - Anthony de Mello
22. “You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.” - Amit Ray
23. “I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.” - Daniel Keyes
24. “One never sleepwalks through grizzlyland, dreaming of other places to be.” - William Stolzenburg
25. “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.” - Malcolm X
26. “The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.” - Louise Erdrich
27. “Anna's eyes soften, and the stubborn tears begin to recede. The way she stands, the way she breathes, I know she wants to come closer. New knowledge fills up the air between us and neither of us wants to breathe it in.” - Kendare Blake
28. “Insecurities have the ability to shape and mold our minds to live with everything that’s bad; like crying on the inside, while smiling on the outside…thus creating pain…but, alas, I have the answer; forget about what you thought and enjoy (embrace) what you feel” - Jeremy Aldana
29. “Each time a man looks into your eyes, he is only searching to find himself; for he knows already, that he is part of you” - Jeremy Aldana
30. “Every day, you get the opportunity to change your life. Change what you do not want. Change what makes you unhappy.” - Rodolfo Costa
31. “Awareness makes us emotionally brilliant.” - Lorii Myers
32. “When the awareness of what is achievable brushes your life, your journey has begun.” - Lorii Myers
33. “All it takes for generosity to flow is awareness. By actively pursuing awareness and knowledge, we can make choices that cause less harm and greater good to others in the global community of our shared earth.” - Zoe Weil
34. “It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.” - Tim O'Brien
35. “Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.” - Criss Jami
36. “Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.” - John Cage
37. “Most men's awareness doesn't extend past their dinner plates.” - Scott Westerfeld
38. “Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.” - Orhan Pamuk
39. “There's no such thing as a minor lapse of awareness. You're either present with what is--right here, right now--or you're someplace else.” - Gay Hendricks
40. “We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.” - Sebastian Faulks
41. “The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.” - Edgar Mitchell
42. “We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from another plane. Dare to listen. Dare to hear with your heart.” - C.J. Heck
43. “To live without love for others is to live in aridity, to be self-serving and fruitless. To live without understanding is to live without sense or purpose. To live without awareness is to live as the deaf, blind and dumb in a world of vibrant light and sound.” - Belsebuub
44. “When you are soul-centered, you can focus your attention where and when you want to, easily, without distraction. You know to look for what you want to see and experience. You know that what you seek you shall find, and what you focus on in life will be more prominent in your awareness. You know your awareness is powerful and creative." ~ Sarah McLean” - Sarah McLean
45. “Don’t let a day go by without asking who you are…each time you let a new ingredient to enter your awareness.” - Deepak Chopra
46. “People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.” - Anthony Burgess
47. “My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.” - Cameron Conaway
48. “You didn't need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.” - Jeannette Walls
49. “The very desire to be certain,to be secure,is the beginning of bondage.It's only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty,and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.” - J.Krishnamurti
50. “Our physical world seems ready and able to accommodate the needs of the spiritually awakened new Superhuman. The constraints or demands of our material world are not the real problem; it is our own spiritual awareness and philosophical wisdom that is lagging behind.” - Anthon St. Maarten
51. “The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and calls consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.” - Pirsig, Robert M.
52. “Evangeline's obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery.” - Sonya Hartnett
53. “I shrugged. “I guess that guys who’d never do something like that have a hard time believing some other guy would,” I said, but I could see her point. Awareness and apologies were fine and good, but they could come too late.” - Tammara Webber
54. “Being aware is being aware of one's own mind and the games it plays on itself.” - Robin Macnaughton
55. “Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.” - Robert McKee
56. “Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.” - McNamara, Robert
57. “No matter what your spiritual condition is, no matter where you find yourself in the universe, your choice is always the same: to expand your awareness or contract it.” - Thaddeus Golas
58. “Awareness Makes a Cure Possible.” - Sydney Davies
59. “A fish cannot be aware of the ocean, before jumping up out of water.” - Rixa White
60. “Without awareness, the current of life cedes its sense of control to other deceptive agents that take you into a life that is toxic rather than nourishing.” - Gary Gordon
61. “We attract what we're meant to because we're aware & self-empowered enough to choose most of the time. Other times we have lessons to learn” - jay woodman
62. “I had a day when I was busy in the world, where the activity created a turmoil on the surface of my consciousness like waves on the surface of the ocean, which made it difficult to see through the waves to the inner silence. It reminded me that we need to develop both the capacity to use the mind when engaged in activity and social relations, and to be able to let go of the activity and to come in contact with the deep inner silence. The relationship between being active in the world and in social relations and the inner silence is like the relationship between the waves on the surface of the ocean and the deep inner silence on the bottom of the ocean.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
63. “It is not many things that modern psychology agress upon, but all the different approaches of psychology agrees on one thing: that people in groups become more stupid. Individually people are more intelligent, because they have to take their own responsibility, but in a group they do not have to take the same responsibility. The two basic power strategies to try to manipulate and gain control over another person are: silencing and attacking. Silencing means to not listen to, to exclude or ignore and not respect a person. Attack can both mean to attack a person directly or to try to discredit a person through lies, to ridicule a person or by spreading malicious rumours. All organizations are more or less dysfunctional. In a dysfunctional group, the members of the group play three different roles: agressor, denier and victim. The agressor is the role that attack and ridicule people, the denier never knows what is going on, there is “no body at home”, and the victim is the resultat of these two roles. It is always easier to follow a group without awareness, than to follow your own heart, to trust your own intelligence, love, truth, silence and creativity.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
64. “Love is what creates the freedom and relaxation to be who we really are.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
65. “The greatest gift we can give to another person is our love.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
66. “Intuition is a capacity of our heart. Our heart is the door to allowing Existence to guide us, instead of being directed by our ideas, desires and expectations. Since the days of Aristotle’s, we have been taught that logic is the only way to reach a solution. But while logic works in a step-by-step-process to reach a solution, intuition simply takes a quantum leap to a solution without any intermediate steps.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
67. “Presence is the capacity to be present for another person with an open heart and to be grounded in our inner being. It is to be present for another person as a supporting light, as a supporting presence – and simply to be present with another person can help.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
68. “Presence is about how every action can arise from the quality, which we call awareness – the presence of our inner being, the presence of our soul. It is a large difference between working with people from the inner being and working with people from duty or a specific technique. Through working from the inner being, we can touch the soul of the other person, while we can only touch the personality of the other person, his surface and periphery, if we just work from a technique.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
69. “We're merely one tree with various types, shapes and sizes of leaves that all wave differently in the breeze” - Rasheed Ogunlaru
70. “Outer relationships with a man or a woman are a mirror of the relationship between our own inner man and woman. Embracing our own inner man and woman means to understand the inner drama that happens between our male and female aspects, which manifests on the outside as relationships.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
71. “When we have developed a trust in both our inner man and woman and they can nourish, support, communicate and cooperate with each other, a love begins to flow between them.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
72. “When both the inner man and woman takes responsibility for themselves and lives their own truth, a joy and love begins to flow naturally between them. Through understanding both the inner man and woman, we understand that outer relationships simply mirror the relationship between our inner man and woman. This understanding gives us the opportunity to take conscious responsibility for our choices and our further steps towards spiritual maturity.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
73. “It is when our inner male and female sides meets within ourselves that a new spark of love, joy, and wholeness arises within ourselves.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
74. “Becoming aware of our inner man and woman means to discover the roots and creative potential of both the male and female aspect within ourselves. Becoming aware of the inner man and woman means to understand that they have different visions of life. It means to understand that they have different perspectives and views of life. The inner man and woman are our two wings of love and freedom. Through awareness, acceptance and understanding, we can allow our two wings to develop in a deep and natural harmony. In the world today, a one-sided development of the male side leads to destructivity. A one-sided development of the male side leads to ego, struggle, exhaustion and a separation from life. A one-sided development of the female side leads to passivity and dependence.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
75. “What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
76. “Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God; it is a sincere seeking for a good thing; and it is a concentration on the thing sought, with faith that it is obtainable.” - Peace Pilgrim
77. “The simple truth is that love is a part of who we are, not something that others "give" to us if we're worthy of it. We're taught that if we just find that right person, and that person "falls in love" with us, everything will be fine. We're not taught about recognizing the love that is a part of our spirits, the love that we radiate when we recognize the beauty and need in all the people that surround us. Love is ours to share, at all moments and in all situations, but for some reason we fear doing so.” - Tom Walsh
78. “The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys.” - Annie Dillard
79. “Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way. I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.” - Annie Dillard
80. “Wars are an outdated way to try to solve conflicts, which is unacceptable in the 21st century. Instead of trying to conquer yourself, wars are an unconscious way to try to conquer life. Wars are an unconscious way to try to conquer death, which is the basic fear in the West.” - Swami Dhyan Giten
81. “We must reject the artificial and embrace what is real and true: truth in food, community, relationships and self.” - Bryant McGill
82. “The most powerful tools of revolution through intention are humility and consciousness.” - Bryant McGill
