Zadie Smith Quotes

Or maybe...just maybe this whole process is our training wheels towards something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures.

Style, I think, is panache. Who are you? What did you do today? And what are you worth to me? What do you have to offer the world? How did you spend your time today on this planet? How are you spending your time every second? What are you doing now? Are you alive, or are you somnambulant?

It's only when we are able to see our own behavior that we are able to wake up and start making conscious choices.

Most people appear to live an unexamined life, cruising through the years without much reflection about what it means, and/or taking what life hands them and believing it's all predestined.

Meditation is the most extraordinary thing if you know how to do it, and you cannot possibly learn from anybody; and that's the beauty of it. It isn't something you learn, a technique, and therefore there is no authority. Therefore if you will learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, the way you talk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy. If you are aware of it without any choice, all that is part of meditation, and as you go, as you journey, as that movement goes, all that movement is meditation. Then that movement is endless, timeless.

I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.

Don't let your life just go in one eye and out the other.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

Can you every single day tell a true testimony of who you are? That's really what life is about.

Learning to cultivate an awareness of the known and unknown within one's being often leads to a healthier and more realistic sense of self.

The only mistake that we can make as human beings is to be asleep, unaware of ourselves.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

I realize that the curriculum is my life on any given day. At this point, more than anything, my spiritual path means looking at every circumstance and trying to see my part in where it's good and where it's not so good.

Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Use your life to wake you up.

To successfully open the door to heightened awareness, we must open it inward.

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

Always try to understand and educate yourselves on the reasons why Allah has given you life, do that part first then enjoy the rest of life and chill out.

One thing I feel clear about is that it's important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven't really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won't look back upon my forties with regret.

O Divine Providence, I ask not for more riches but more wisdom with which to make wiser use of the riches you gave me at birth, consisting in the power to control and direct my own mind to whatever ends I might desire.

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.