William James Quotes

The quality of one's life depends on the quality of attention. Whatever you pay attention to will grow more important in your life. There is no limit to the kinds of changes that awareness can produce.

Our life experiences area result of where our attention takes us.

Life is but thought.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

At any moment in time, our reality is based on whatever we focus on.

And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything.

Sometimes you lose sight of what's going on around you.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

Your thoughts do not create reality, but they do create your experience.

Attention is the key to transformation- and full attention also implies acceptance.

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

Remember, whatever we put our attention on expands in our experience, so consider where you are focusing your time and energy.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

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

How we pay attention to the present moment...determin es the character of our experience and...the quality of our lives.

Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections.

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

The quality of our attention determines our experience.

Our awareness is the key. It is our awareness more than our work effort that gets the right result right now.

Life is consciousness.

The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we're continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.

Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it was somewhere else. No one seems to have noticed this fact. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience. And once one has come to this understanding he will be a different person from that point on, though he may not always bare it in mind. When one understands this settling into single-mindedness well, his affairs will thin out.