Quotes & Sayings About A Moment Of Clarity

A few things go through your mind when you do something stupid. Like, oh hell this was stupid, along with that moment of perfect clarity that this might be the last stupid thing you ever do. — Amelia Hutchins

If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the 'slow hunch.' We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them." Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time - available to the propitious moment, the kairos. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation. — Douglas Rushkoff

When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness. — Stephen Jay Gould

As many as thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting, enough beyond the shock to think again, it would occur to Emilio Sandoz to wonder if perhaps that day int he Sudan was really only part of the setup for a punchline a life-time in the making. It was an odd thought, under the circumstances. He understood that, even at the time. But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rhakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God. — Mary Doria Russell

Thick lashes lifted, a moment of pure clarity in the dark gray as Noah wrapped his arm around her waist. "Meant to ask you to marry me, put the ring in the plant soil, but gardener made me drunk. He's so small. What happened?" — Nalini Singh

Your moment of clarity comes when you face your fears. Sobriety gave me back me - my life. Self-medication kills you slowly. You can never get a handle on that. It's a highly destructive force that has to be dealt with on a spiritual level as much as a physical one. — Chaka Khan

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining. — Joni Mitchell

The single biggest challenge to any organization is the constant cloud of fear and doubt that swirls around the heads of the people involved. As a leader, your job is to hold fast to the big picture, to keep seeing in your mind's eye, with crystal clarity, where it is you're going - that place that right at this moment exists only in your mind's eye. And to keep seeing that, even when nobody else does.
Especially when nobody else does.
Your people count on you to do this. It's the biggest job you have. — Bob Burg And John David Mann

Colin didn't want to go back to his room. He walked around for a very long time, looking down at the sidewalks and streets, and thought of the things he and Dana might say to each other if she were with him. And every once in a while he would catch himself smiling and laughing a little, and it was those moments right after - as, having lapsed into fantasy, there was a correction, a moment of nothing and then a loose and sudden rush, back into the real world in a trick of escape, as if to some new place of possibilities - that he felt at once, and with clarity, most exhilarated, appreciative, disappointed, and accepting. — Tao Lin

Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn't have limits. Existence means there's always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn't always being some other thing that's beyond it?"

At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.

"Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number - say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 - there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger..."

"But that's just numbers," protested my master Caeiro.

And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:

"What is 34 in Reality, anyway? — Alvaro De Campos

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. — Randy Alcorn

Picking them up and reading them, I felt sadness do deep that it will never really be gone. It was a sobering moment
sobering not because I was drunk, but because I felt like I was shifting into this new state of naked clarity. It was higher state of sobriety, a painful state of sobriety, because the truth was suddenly unvarnished, making me feel unvarnished. — David Levithan

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory. — Nicole Krauss

He looked up at her. Age and worry had taken their toll on her frail body, but she was kind and beautiful. And for a moment, memories and thoughts swam to the surface, the world coming into utter clarity. And all of them revolved around Amanda, his wife of fifty years. — Crissy Moss

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country. — Eric Weiner

There's a fleeting moment that exists for every individual just before they do something truly life-altering. Its that flash of insight and sanity that stalls your heartbeat and bloo flow - a quick warning - just before you explode and make a fool of yourself. Or that incredible brief instant of clarity you have before you floor the gas pedal and run the red light. It's a split second of self admonishment in which you realise that what you're about to do is wrong, but just as quickly choose to ignore that realisation and do it anyway. It's too fast to catch, too bright to see, utterly gone even before you've blinked and therefore, it does a person absolutely no good at all. And yet, there it is. — Heather Killough-Walden

Celaena had a sudden moment of clarity then, as her hair ripped from her braid and the wind tore at her clothes. Of all the girls in all the world, here she was on a spit of beach in the Red Desert, astride an Asterion horse, racing faster than the wind. Most would never experience this - she would never experience anything like this again. And for that one heartbeat, when there was nothing more to it than that, she tasted bliss so complete that she tipped her head back to the sky and laughed. — Sarah J. Maas

Yes: I exist inside my body.
I'm not carrying the sun and the moon in my pocket.
I don't want to conquer worlds because I slept badly,
And I don't want to eat the world for breakfast because I have a stomach.
Indifferent?
No: a son of the earth, who, if he jumps, it's wrong,
A moment in the air that's not for us,
And only happy when his feet hit the ground again,
Pow! In reality where nothing's missing!

(6/20/1919) — Alberto Caeiro

What am I doing? Perhaps the evil witch had a point.
No, I refuse to believe that. She's so cold and cruel. I shake my head. She's wrong. I am right for Christian. I am what he needs. And. In that moment of stunning clarity, I don't question how he's lived his life until recently - but why. His reasons for doing what he's done to countless girls - I don't even want to know how many. The how isn't wrong. They were all adults. They were all - How did Flynn put it? - in safe, sane, consensual relationships. It's the why. The why was wrong. The why was from his place of darkness.
I close my eyes and drape my arm over them. But now he's move on, left it all behind, and we are both in the light. — E.L. James

Sometimes a moment of clarity shines so brightly, you have no choice but to walk into the light - or hide under the rug. — Cathryn Louis

There is something breathtaking about the basic laws of crystals. They are in no sense a discovery of the human mind; they just "are" - they exist quite independently of us. The most that man can do is become aware, in a moment of clarity, that they are there, and take cognizance of them. — M.C. Escher

I actually do have a motto," said Heat. "It's 'Never forget who you work for.'" And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn't exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That's when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook's living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become - and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim. — Richard Castle

Strike experienced a moment of pure clarity: he would never make it out of here, would never rise above his current position as Rodney's lieutenant, because all the intelligence and prudence and vision came to nothing if it wasn't tempered and supported by a certain blindness, an oblivious animal will that Rodney had, that he, Strike, did not have.
Rodney would survive all this not because of his guts or his brains, but because he understood that there was no real life out here on the street, no real lives other than his own, and that what really mattered was coming first in all things, in all ways and at all costs. — Richard Price

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying. — Allen Ginsberg

John 8:44 says Satan is a liar and the father of lies. He captures and conquers men's lives through his convincing lies, often nullifying good intentions with wrongful actions that seemed manly in the moment but in the end lacked the balancing power of clarity. — James MacDonald

Nirvana manifests as ease, as love, as connectedness, as generosity, as clarity, as unshakable freedom. This isn't watering down nirvana. This is the reality of liberation that we can experience, sometimes in a moment and sometimes in transformative ways that change our entire life — Jack Kornfield

I suppose there's a time in life when a garden of roses and lavender fails to blind a girl to the true shabbiness of a place. I myself had not reached that moment of clarity. — Katie Crouch

There is a Life Stream that flows to you, and this is a Stream of clarity, a Stream of wellness, a Stream of abundance - and in any moment, you are allowing it or not. What someone else does with the Stream, or not, does not have anything to do with how much of it will be left for you. — Esther Hicks

It occurred to her, in a moment of sudden clarity, that what had always caused her anxiety, or stress, or worry, was not any one force, nothing independent and external- it wasn't danger to herself or the constant calamity of other people and their problems. It was internal: it was subjective: it was not knowing. — Dave Eggers

When you see the truth for the first time, it is what people call a peak moment, or a moment of clarity. You get a larger percentage of what each moment of life actually contains; you are filled with life. Your mind is the gatekeeper of life, and sometimes it lets a little true life in, but most of the time it does not.

Without the mind blocking life, you receive all of life, true life, and reflect it all back out.

Seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon for the first time is a peak moment for most people. Why does it make you feel so alive? Nothing really happens to you. Why doesn't it feel as good the second time you see it? You are seeing the same thing. The reason is, your mind opens up when something is special.

The truth is, every moment of life is special, and you can be completely open to life most of the time. You have to see the truth to see true life. — Michael Smith

Try to fit in." Winter glanced at her, a moment of perfect clarity and even humor in the look. She was right. They were filthy. They were bloody. Winter was a well-loved princess who was prettier than a bouquet of roses and crazier than a headless chicken. Fitting in would be a miracle. — Marissa Meyer

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be. — Alice Sebold

The moment had gone. You're probably thinking, How much concentration does a man need to throw himself off the top of a high building? Well, you'd be surprised. Before Maureen arrived I'd been in the zone; I was in a place where it would have been easy to push myself off. I was entirely focused on all the reasons I was up there in the first place; I understood with horrible clarity the impossibility of attempting to resume life down on the ground. But the conversation with her had distracted me, pulled me back out into the world, into the cold and the wind and the noise of the thumping bass seven floors below. — Nick Hornby

Certain moments in my life are imprinted in me memory.
They're easy to recall with perfect clarity, whether I want to remember them or not. Any small thing can trigger them: a phrase, a smell, a thought. It brings everything back like I'm reliving that moment, a brief scene in the movie of my life, complete with how horrible I felt at the time. And I usually felt horrible in those moments that I want to forget that stick around. — Elizabeth Norris

Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It's a trite axiom, but practice DOES make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program every day, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time. — Anthony Kiedis

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life. — Isaac Marion

I had a moment of clarity, and I wondered if my life would end in his hands. Maybe not today but one day. If our destiny was to destroy each other, that might only be fitting. — Trina M. Lee

Mindfulness (present-moment awareness) is deliberately focusing our attention on our thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and mental activity without losing awareness of what is happening in the present moment. It is essentially being in a state of present-moment awareness and maintaining clarity without being swayed or distracted by mental commentary. — Christopher Dines

I worked as an assistant editor, actually, for a few years. That was right when I was just starting to get out at night and do a lot of stand-up, improv, and sketch work in New York. It really is invaluable. I think it pounded into me an awareness of what an editor wants and needs, in terms of clarity of a moment, where and when to start and stop a line. — Ed Helms

My arm is weighted by the huge pile of clothing she's hung over it. A moment of clarity comes over me. This isn't what friendship is about, I know that now. — Dawn O'Porter

After you run, there's a sense of accomplishment; you feel like your life is meaningful. It's a moment of clarity. — Sakyong Mipham

I didn't say, "I'll call you." I didn't hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left. I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn't going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes. I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn't been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she'd asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that. — Barry Eisler

But it is an American thing to love one's roots. American nationality, I mused, is a very special and unique phenomenon in the world. In America, but for Native Americans, all of our forebears hailed from somewhere else. And for all the grief that brought my parents to America, it translates into my good fortune to be born an American. In this hypnotic moment of clarity, I knew where I belonged. — Marianne Meyerhoff

People are living in unconsciousness, doing all kinds of things in unconsciousness. Everybody is an unconscious robot. We are just pretending that we are conscious; we are not conscious. The moment you become conscious, all unconscious actions disappear from your life. Your life starts moving in a new dimension. Your each act comes out of inner clarity; your each response is virtuous, is virtue. To live unconsciously is to live in sin; to live consciously is to be virtuous, is to be religious. And to live in total awareness is to be a buddha, is to be a christ. — Rajneesh

I may have no emotional skin and come undone at the smallest interpersonal upset, but I'd make a great bullfighter or firefighter - anything that gets my adrenaline going and focuses me on a physical target. The motorcycle is all of that and more. When I'm on the bike, it feels like a door opens in my chest and the world rushes in, pure, fresh, and sparkling with clarity. It forces me to approach fear with total awareness and to pull reason mind into the moment of intense reactions. — Kiera Van Gelder

I never enjoy anything. I'm always waiting for whatever's next. I think everyone's like that..living life in fast-forward. Never stopping to enjoy the moment. Too busy trying to rush through everything so we can get on with what we're really supposed to be doing with our lives. I get these flashes of clarity, brilliant clarity, where for a second I stop and I think "Wait, this is it. This is my life. I better slow down and enjoy it because one day we're all gonna end up in the ground and that'll be it. We'll be gone. — Josh Boone

The past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents' funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized front-page baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free — Salman Rushdie

He would think of it later, he thought; one moves step by step and one must keep moving. For the moment, with an unnatural clarity, with a brutal simplification that made it almost easy, his consciousness contained nothing but one thought: It must not stop me. The sentence hung alone, with no past and no future. He did not think of what it was that must not stop him, or why this sentence was such a crucial absolute. It held him and he obeyed. He went step by step. — Ayn Rand

Enlightenment, it is a moment of complete clarity, of pure bliss. At that instant everything will be revealed to you. — Tan Twan Eng

On the thought a blessed silence came, an empty clarity. He took it a first for utter desolation, but desolation was a type of free fall, perpetual and without ground below. This was stillness: balanced, solid, weirdly serene. No momentum to it at all, forward or backwards or sideways.
He lay drained of tension, not moving, and content to be so. The oddly stretched moment was like a bite of eternity, eaten on the run. Was this quiet place inside something new-grown, or had he just never stumbled upon it before? How could so vast a thing lay undiscovered for so long? His breathing slowed and deepened. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Doing the right thing isn't supposed to hurt this bad.
When you're faced with a choice and you choose the right one, there's supposed to be this big moment of clarity you experience. It's an overall kind of feeling; where you just know instinctively that the choice you've made is right and you move ahead feeling lighter and better than you've ever felt because of it. — Melyssa Winchester

Individual growth towards love and wisdom is slow. A community's growth is even slower. Members of a community have to be friends of time. They have to learn that many things will resolve themselves if they are given enough time. It can be a great mistake to want, in the name of clarity and truth, to push things too quickly to a resolution. Some people enjoy confrontation and highlighting divisions. This is not always healthy. It is better to be a friend of time. But clearly too, people should not pretend that problems don't exist by refusing to listen to the rumblings of discontent; they must be aware of the tensions and then learn to work on them at the right moment. — Jean Vanier

An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do. — Russell Hoban

Closing his eyes again, Beck repositions his head on the back of his seat, and in one sure movement, reaches over and grabs my hand. Even with his eyes closed, he knew where to find me. I want to cry for a thousand reasons, laugh for a thousand others; this is my anomalous balance, the place where Beck and I can let the ridiculousness of our collective sentences marinate, and other things, too. It's a singular moment of clarity between two people, and rare or not, I'm not about to let go.
I'm done roaming hillsides.
I've scoured the corners of the earth.
And I've found my people.
God, I'm almost jealous of myself.
Holding Beck's hand in my lap, I find a courage I never knew I had and drop my head on his shoulder. — David Arnold

Or was the "something" that had changed ... me? There comes a moment in every relationship when taking up permanent residence in the gray area between what is and what isn't is no longer enough. When the need for clarity surpasses the need to make things work. When you start to realize that the constant limbo of an undefined relationship isn't as fun as it was when the music first started. When you have to seek your own closure, because the other person cannot or will not give it to you. — Mandy Hale

My past made me who I am today. I can't just pretend it never happened. But the biggest lesson I learnt from that, is that I can be an example for others who are still struggling! There's always hope and help for everyone. I think it's my responsibility to do that, to help. I always refer to this as the "moment of clarity". It's hard to explain what really happened, but it was a once in a lifetime kind of moment. I had reached my lowest point and I just knew things had to change quickly because there was just no other way, you know. — Cory Monteith

Corey was hanging out down by the port one afternoon with Karl and Jacques when a bus-load of american tourists drove by, and in a moment of clarity Corey suddenly perceived Karl in the light of reality rather than through the kaleidoscope of fashion: the tourists were staring open-mouthed through the bus windows, ice creams held in mid-air, gawping at the apparition that was Karl. Jacques was driving the mobylette and Karl sat behind riding side-saddle dressed in hot pants, long strands of pearls and dark glasses; he was wielding a raw frankfurter straight from the packet in one hand and a bottle of coca-cola in the other. I remember thinking "I am with this total freak," says Corey. — Alicia Drake

In another moment, when I had drunk exactly the right amount of champagne, I should have a vision. I took a sip. And now, with extreme clarity, without passion or malice, I saw what Life really is. It had something, I remember, to do with the revolving sunshade. Yes, I murmured to myself, let them dance. They are dancing, I am glad. — Christopher Isherwood

It's one of those things where when you're training and fighting, you can't worry about your bills, your mortgage, did you get your girlfriend pregnant, your pet's cancer, or anything. Nothing else matters but that dude trying to kick you in the face or throw you on your head or trying to rip your arm out of the socket. It becomes a singularity of purpose, which an ADD kid like me rarely gets. I like that moment of clarity in fights, and I truly have that. I lose myself in the details of those 15 minutes and you don't worry about what people think of you. — Forrest Griffin

I thought that nothing enormously bad or good had happened to me during my life. All the normal things had occurred. I had lived a completely unremarkable life. I wanted only my home, and the love and safety of those around me, nothing else. I knew there was no particular reason why I was put on this earth, but here I was and I was glad to be here, awed by the beauty of it. It was a perfect moment. (p.99) — Michael Zadoorian

The male climax was accompanied by a split second entirely devoid of thought. A brief mental vacuum. A moment of clarity during which God could be glimpsed. Meditation gurus achieved similar states of thoughtlessness without sex and often described Nirvana as a never-ending spiritual orgasm. — Dan Brown

You know it with startling clarity in that moment - how there's only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It's dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it's the one hope you need to reach for this Advent. That scarlet lifeline of Christ. — Ann Voskamp

Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers' marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to be replaced, let's just use this moment to celebrate what an elegant and imaginative job it did while it had the chance. — Lynne Truss

She had a choice. For one brilliant moment, it beamed at her with an unusual clarity, fixing itself in her mind. She could push her fingers into the waistband of his shorts and discover the precise scope of Levi's desire, or she could withdraw her hand and let whatever was between them continue to build. Either way, the end would be the same. Levi would walk away with some piece of her. The only question was, how big of a chunk would he take? Which path would bring the most heartache? It was coming, like a train steaming down the tracks, a frightening rush of noise and smoke and unstoppable momentum. Her only choices lay in the when and the how. — Lucy Varna

Once in a while you get a moment of clarity - an inspiration - and they don't come that frequently. — Paul Reiser

The majority enjoy a young girl as they enjoy a glass of champagne, at one effervescent moment-oh, yes, that is really beautiful, and with many a young girl that is undoubtedly the most one can attain, but here there is more. If an individual is too fragile to stand clarity and transparency, well, then one enjoys what is unclear, but apparently she can stand it. The more devotedness one can bring to erotic love, the more interesting. This momentary enjoyment is a rape, even if not outwardly but nevertheless mentally, and in a rape there is only imagined enjoyment; it is like a stolen kiss, something nondescript. No, if one can bring it to a point where a girl has but one task for her freedom, to give herself, so that she feels her whole happiness in this, so that she practically begs for this devotedness and yet is free-only then is there enjoyment, but this always takes a discerning touch — Soren Kierkegaard

A moment of clarity

I realise that I stress so much about the past, because I am scared of the future.
It is easier for my mind to occupy itself with troubles of long-ago; rather than greet fears of the unknown tomorrow.
The goal is to be alive now and live in the moment. But there are days when I find this almost impossible to achieve.
Yet knowing this is liberating.

Jane Yates 02/02/2016 — J. Yates

He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, for a moment wanting nothing but to fall asleep and never wake up again, or to do the opposite and kneel, bashing his head against the floor until it was over. But there was still that small sliver of clarity in his mind. He held on to it like a man clinging to a root on the side of a sheer cliff. — James Dashner

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality. It wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation. — David Michie

Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves. — Dean Koontz

They told me at the end of that test that they wanted me to be a part of this project. I walked out and had a moment of clarity where I thought, not many people will ever have this moment. — Wentworth Miller

A great moment of clarity when I realized I'm dying. There's no reason to wait to do the things we want to do. — John Tesh

Was there supposed to be a moment of blinding clarity when the path through the thicket appeared, brightly illuminated, and Good, Bad, and Morally Neutral all sorted themselves out, slightly messy but completely unambiguous, like egg yolk and egg white and shell?
If so, I missed it — Ann Redisch Stampler

We are born male. We must learn to be men. Remember, strength is a force. It is an attribute of the heart. Its opposite is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of sound intention. If you are able to discern the path with heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then and only then are you strong. Remember the words of Tao te ching. "The only true strength is a strength that people do not fear." Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave. — Kent Nerburn

I played music practically my entire life. But the first time I ever really played music was with John and Robby and Jim That's where it happened. it was an epiphany, a moment of profound clarity — Ray Manzarek

Passing from one dimension to another, he feels that nothing is left behind, but rather is always with him in the moment. His life is no more a myth than other man's, his needs much the same. The only price he pays for this exquisite singularity may be the intrusion of his fellow dreamers who sometimes call him on the telephone. They mean no harm. They too are innocent. Clarity is all any man seeks, this Somnambulist merely find his on the other Side. — Ralph Gibson

It is a tricky business to know when you should set goals and objectives in order to achieve a focus, and when you would be better off dealing with the acceptance and management of your current reality so you can later step into new directions and responsibilities with greater stability and clarity. Only you will know the answer to that, and only in the moment. — David Allen

Sometimes love didn't spring up on you in a moment of blinding clarity. Sometimes it crept up on you on a Tuesday night while you were standing at the sink doing dishes, the feeling settling into your soul in a way that made it too heavy to ignore anymore. — Jessica Gadziala

My life had become some sort of sick, twisted game and the winner would be the best player. Marcus playing the part of an anxious concerned parent and I playing the part of an indifferent and sullen teenager. He and I were the only players in this game and for a while, he had defeated me. I was ready to give up and he would have won. That was a moment of true clarity for me. If my life was to be a game, then I'd be damned if I would let Marcus Fairmont win! — Kirsty Dallas

In the next hour, as he lay dying, he thought only of that moment of serenity, kneeling next to the church where he had been a boy before he grew into a man and realized the clarity of strength, his knees damp in the wet ground and in his palm the blue and red and purple glass.

As he lay dying, his flesh ripped like fabric, his blood flowing freely like the rain that came so often, he thought only of those beautiful shards of glass and the weight that they carried, and he found it difficult to comprehend that while he held those small holy things, how something so big and so powerful and so violent could have been so silent as it crept up behind him. — Michael Farris Smith

Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
There passes for a moment the figure of a man.
His steps go with "him" in the same reality,
But I look at him and them, and they're two things:
The "man" goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,
And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.
I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.
How perfect that he is in him what he is - his body,
His true reality which doesn't have desires or hopes,
But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them. — Alberto Caeiro

In your serenity there is a clarity, strength and correctness that is beyond the petty scuffles of the moment - a greater truth. It is the truth of who you are; beautiful, calm, secure, open, willing and safe. — Bryant McGill

We Shall Overcome by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit. — Pat Conroy

GGibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam
the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. — George MacDonald

People often say "Just look for the silver lining." But what do you say to the person surrounded by fog? They don't see a fluffy object in the sky, blocking the sun for a moment or two. But instead, they see everything as it was before, but through the murky, un-clarity of hopelessness. As if they were standing at the bottom of a grimy lake except able to breathe. But not wanting to because with each breath they grow numb from the cold loneliness. What if they're surrounded by a dreary blanket of darkness, made up of their own thoughts, too impenetrable for any light to break through? So what do you tell that person who, as far as the eye could see, only sees fog? A place where there is no silver lining peeking around the corner. Imagine a place where your only companion is the confusion you walk around with. — Sadie Turner

When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you were waking up from a dream, the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity. No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is. — Eckhart Tolle

We have moments of such clarity, of such appreciation of the incredible web of interconnected events that carry us from breath to breath, day to day, as long as we live-and the next moment we fret about how much we weigh. Or who we didn't send a Valentine. Or who forgot to compliment the dinner. Or whatever. — Sylvia Boorstein

Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose. — David Deida

When you play guitar you are drawing a frame around a moment and saying to the listener, 'Here is how I want you to experience this. How you begin and end a solo is framing, How you structure a song is framing, how you present yourself onstage is framing. See every corner, not just the center, framing should heighten the impact of the art and give clarity to your vision. — Philip Toshio Sudo

Have you ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with lack of sleep or hectic with mindless obligations and you about to rush off on an early adventure or business, but full of deep silence and absolute clarity of perception? A dawning which you truly observe, degree by degree. It is the most amazing moment of birth. And more than anything it can spur you to action. Have a burning day. — Vera Nazarian

It's important to have a vision of the long run and make wise decisions for our highest good in the present moment; however, we don't want to become attached to how everything must look. When we show up in good faith, life provides. And when we trust, we are always in the flow of manifestation. — Alaric Hutchinson

It's a powerful statement and one that Whitney sings with a grandeur that approaches the sublime. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it's not too late for us to better ourselves, to act kinder. Since it's impossible in the world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It's an important message, crucial really, and it's beautifully stated in this album. — Bret Easton Ellis

It was frightening, this new clarity of vision: but I felt free at last to know darkness as the other side of light, and that both were needed for sight.
And with that thought - it was almost as though I felt it in truth - the shackles of my old imprisoned self fell away at last. No more did I long for a warm bed behind safe walls. My heart drank in the beauty and wonder and danger of the world, and I saw for the first time that life was not something to survive, but something - the only thing - to be savoured in all its diversity. Light and dark together, mingled in all things, giving depth and substance where either alone was a pale shadow. I felt from that moment I might begin to find all things new. — Elizabeth Kerner

There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed. — M.C. Escher

When I was halfway between one world and another, a moment of clarity broke through. This is what it was to die. * — Mary E. Pearson

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. — Rebecca McNutt

Mark felt the Berg descending. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, for a moment wanting nothing but to fall asleep and never wake up again, or to do the opposite and kneel, bashing his head against the floor until it was over. But there was still that small sliver of clarity in his mind. He held on to it like a man clinging to a root on the side of a sheer cliff. Eyes open again. With a grunt, he forced himself to his feet, leaning against the window. The small city of Asheville lay spread out before them. Walls had been constructed out of wood, — James Dashner

I don't have the words to describe my feelings.
A woman, the last thing I think of before falling asleep.
A woman, the first thing I think of when I wake.
A woman, the image that passes before my mind's eye
in a moment of clarity.
A woman, the hands we hold,
the one thing I miss most.
A woman, the laughter that warms my heart and soul.
A woman, the perfume that invokes wonderful memories.
A woman, the love, the love, the embrace, the joy,
the wonderful joy. — Jeffrey A. White

She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she'd seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else. — Tessa Hadley

As men we cannot take our eyes off the road for even a second. One bad moment can destroy a lifetime of careful watching. One weak, selfish decision can crash a decade of keeping your eyes on the road. God grant to us Holy Throne-Room clarity at all times in every situation so that what we are really living for doesn't crash before our eyes. — James MacDonald