A Quote by Rachel Naomi Remen

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every class: "Stay awake." "Pay attention." But paying attention is no simple matter. It requires us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and masks. It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open to surprise.

Rachel Naomi Remen

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Asked Asks Attention Awake Been Class Conclusions Distracted Early Every Everyone Everything Expectations Experiences Jump Labels Learns Life Masks Matter Offers Open Past Past Experiences Pay Pay Attention Paying Remain Requires Same Same Thing Simple Stay Surprise Teaches Thing Us Wisdom

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Rachel Naomi Remen
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Born: February 8, 1938

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.

Rachel Naomi Remen

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

Frederick Buechner

I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.

Richard Ford

Every word and every deed, every thought and every gesture, even the simple act of paying attention can be a gift and therefore an echo of God’s life in us.

Miroslav Volf

When a customer asks what no one else has ever asked, pay close attention.

Ron Kaufman

God asks everything of us, yet at the same time he offers everything to us.

Pope Francis

Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, "Let's go do that together.

Bob Goff

There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.

W. S. Merwin

Paying attention to what we allow ourselves to pay attention to is a tricky thing. It's like being in two places at once but completely worth the discipline. We can react mindlessly or respond mindfully. It's up to us.

Tara Stiles

I think when people see photos of you out and about in your personal life, they assume that you've asked for it or that you want that attention, but I don't think anyone in their right mind asks for that kind of thing.

Liam Hemsworth

Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

David Whyte

I think God asks us to promise to replenish the planet and to pay 100% attention to our young so that they will develop character and a good conscience.

Louis Gossett, Jr.

As black people we were out to further our equality. I don't pay attention to the controversial connotations put on by media and the undermining labels they place on us. We pay attention to what our community situation is and what we need.

Chuck D

Silence is Golden; it has divine power and immense energy. Try to pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, and every word. The unmanifested is present in this world as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.

Eckhart Tolle

Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.

David Whyte

In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.

Karen Joy Fowler

A Quote by Rachel Naomi Remen

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