Jane Jacobs Quotes

The secret is to be awake. To be awake is everything.

Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.

Be aware of everything around you, because you are receiving the answers to your questions in every moment of the day.

To the man whose senses are alive and alert there is not even the need to stir from one's threshold.

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

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Presence is more than just being there.

I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.

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.

Every thought is an afterthought.

I think inspiration is always around; it's just a question of whether or not you're noticing it.

To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

Some people say, the world can be so alive! It always is, you just do not know it because of the screen of your thinking. You notice it as you become more awake.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.

Watchfulness is experiencing a sudden glimpse of something without any qualifications - just the sudden glimpse itself.

You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

We are all too much inclined, I think, to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all round us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked.

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.

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.