Heightened Sense Quotes & Sayings

We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer. — John Ortberg Jr.

Among the rewards of his expatriation were a heightened awareness of what he saw and an exhilarating sense of freedom. Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die. — John Cheever

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor. — Brian Eno

You tend to compose things more in the middle of frame in 3-D than you would in a conventional frame. You can really see composition in 2-D but in 3-D your composition is much more complex. Everything has to be artificially enhanced. But you do gain something else with 3-D: you have a sense of space and heightened reality. — Caleb Deschanel

My grandmother's death had given me a heightened sense of individual solitude, of each one of us walking towards his own death, with no one able to help us or hold us back. — Francoise Gilot

we have a palpable sense that Tolstoy as a novelist tests his characters' muscles and trains his reader to track their spasms so that by the time we come to the meeting between Kitty and Levin we are able to share the latter's understanding that what was inexpressible in words was given meaning in 'every movement of her lips, her eyes, and her hands'. So Kitty's nervousness at the outcome of her meeting with Levin is expressed in and heightened by the failure of her fork to spear a slippery pickled mushroom on her plate. A slight muscular reflex, such as Kitty's hand in — Leo Tolstoy

Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers. — James Wolcott

The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama. — Rashers Tierney

I think play and joy and feeling good deserve more of our time. I don't see why adults are supposed to grow out of those things. If I have a mission it's to make everyone who comes to my concerts leave feeling a heightened sense of freedom to play, sing, and enjoy themselves. — Bobby McFerrin

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer. — Jeff Koons

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature ... — Edith Sitwell

The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it. — R. W. Apple Jr.

I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality. These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any attempt to titrate them, damp them down, could tip the person from a pathologically heightened state to one of great dullness, a sort of mental death. — Oliver Sacks

The music plays ... and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream. — David Mutti Clark

Fling yourself at life and let yourself feel what you do feel upon the very tick of the second; snatch the images of life that fly through the brain. If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbols of your direct reactions. Thus, you will, perhaps, find yourself reaching a heightened sense of awareness completely outside the realm of mundane experience. — Mina Loy

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment ... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality. — Laurie Simmons

I think I was always interested in the larger world, even as a kid, and my experiences as a journalist only heightened that interest. Covering conflict, I learned that though leaders often try to create a sense of "us" and "them," the differences are not that delineated. I often felt like it was a whole bunch of "us," with some of "them" scattered around. That made me feel that the borders we draw around ourselves are often artificial.
— Masha Hamilton

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. — J.G. Ballard

You folks like TV, you watch a lot of TV? There's a show right here on CBS, it's a huge hit. It's called the "Mentalist." And it's about this guy who has a heightened sense of observation. It's miraculous; he's the only guy in the world who can tell the difference between Sarah Palin and Tina Fey. — David Letterman

We all want to fall in love. Why? Because that experience makes us feel completely alive. Where every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered and we are flying into the heavens. It may only last a moment, and hour, an afternoon. But that doesn't diminish its value. Because we are left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives. — Niall O Donaill

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered. — V.S. Naipaul

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment
that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect. — Douglas Coupland

The blues are just a heightened sense of awareness of life's ups and downs, and things that a guy sees after a couple hits of Jack Daniels. — Steven Tyler

Why do you need to see him? (Remi)
Wolf business, and the last time I sniffed, which I'm trying real hard not to do 'cause the stench of you assholes is rough on my heightened sense of smell, you're a bear. Grab his hide and send it over. (Fury) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

You grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn't until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place. — Terri Sewell

I began to pray for help with what I needed and wanted as well as for the knowledge of God's will for me and the power to carry it out. Immediately, I felt a heightened sense of spiritual companionship. — Julia Cameron

True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle. — Hugh Blair

True communion with nature becomes possible when the energy sense is turned on and heightened. You're moved by the sounds of a bird singing in the morning, and you can feel the principles of nature even in a single leaf falling with its back to the setting sun. You come to realize that you were never alone, that you have always been breathing surrounded by the massive energy of life. — Ilchi Lee

For the act of criticizing heightened his sense of importance, made him feel larger. — Aldous Huxley

In terms of legacy, I'm not sure that I see some great historic deposit there, as a result of her passing our way. She heightened the sense of social conscience in the New Deal generally. To her great credit, she was early on the side of the blacks in their fight for civil rights. She had a tendency to participate, which easily oozed over into meddlesomeness. — William A. Rusher

The Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable. But if you were crossing a mall parking lot late at night, your entire sense of danger would be heightened. You would stand straight. You'd walk quickly. You'd know where you were going. You would look for light. — James Comey

Curiosity restores is a state of heightened awareness. Culturally, this has been considered a child's activity. By the time we're grown, we're supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life's miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars. — Christina Baldwin

No individual can be in full control of his fate-our strengths come significantly from our history, our experiences largely from the vagaries of chance. But by seizing the opportunity to leverage and frame these experiences, we gain agency over them. And this heightened agency, in turn, places us in a stronger position to deal with future experiences, even as it may alter our own sense of strengths and possibilities. — Howard Gardner

A sense of solemn aspiration comes upon us as we view the mountain. We are uplifted. The entire scale of being is raised. Our outlook on life seems all at once to have been heightened. And not only is there this sense of elevation: we seem purified also. Meanness, pettiness, paltriness seem to shrink away abashed at the sight of that radiant purity. — Francis Younghusband

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. — Winston Churchill

Paranoia is just a heightened sense of awareness — John Lennon

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours. — Catherine Drinker Bowen

We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality - to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behavior, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves. — Robert Greene