Marcus Aurelius Quotes

I'm pretty much done with mindfulness. I'm just going to start paying attention.

Listening is active. At its most basic level, it's about focus, paying attention.

The best thing anybody ever told me about acting - and I think it's probably true for life, generally - is listen. You've really got to watch, and you've really got to listen. Not see and hear.

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

When you listen with perfect awareness, then listening becomes possible.

What you look at hard seems to look at you.

A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you're aware in anything you do - and it doesn't have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you.

I know if I'm lost in the moment or not.

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

Presence is more than just being there.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

When we turn on our observation capabilities, we become much more in the moment and much more powerful. Psychic powers have been known to develop from consistent practice of paying attention. It's available to us all. It's all in what we choose to practice.

The best way to learn to be present and develop presence is to have the experience of someone you respect and admire being present with and for you.

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

I'm not aware of too many things, I know what I know, if you know what I mean.

The quality of our attention determines our experience.

You don't always have to look in the distance for what's going on over there, when you actually see what's right in front of you.