Quotes & Sayings About Realizations

When we ponder the vastness of the universe and eternity, we are closer to understanding the role of death in the mysterious life we are all experiencing. Through these realizations, greater acceptance of the inevitability of death positions us to be happier in our lives. After my journey through these ideas I feel strongly that happiness and a deeper understanding of death are linked phenomena that offer a fuller existence. — Loren Mayshark

To see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself. — Richard Wright

I've come to the realizations that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing half the time. — David Bowie

It's not that the people are bad but it's the situation which ruins the thoughts of the people. The situation where we forget what's right and what's wrong ... that's the moment where we do wrong which we realize long later ... — Debolina Bhawal

Among the important realizations I had in my own days in the practice room was that if any one route to any one phrase didn't work after days of trying, then the exact opposite route should at least be explored, as well as every alternative in between, as counterintuitive as that often seemed. — Renee Fleming

It is great that even before we become enlightened or generate any lam-rim realizations we are able to offer incredible benefit to others. The person who does this is a very fortunate person and should rejoice very often. — Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

All I really, really want to do is find a very, very fine chocolate store that I can walk into and then figure out how in the world one manages to pick out just a few chocolates out of all those very many chocolates! If I am one day able to walk into a fine chocolate store and know for certain which chocolates I want, when that happens, I will believe myself to be accomplished! — C. JoyBell C.

It was strange to see someone you have only known alone begin interacting with other people, for that somebody known to you disappears and is replaced by a different, more complex, person. You watch him revolve in this new company, revealing new facets, and there is nothing you can do but hope you like these other sides as much as you like the side that seemed whole when it faced only you. — Peter Cameron

I sometimes doubt whether even the friends whose kind thoughts turned downwards me that evening from the distant South and West could realize how cheerful is the recollection of the Christmas spent in the solitude and cold of the desert. — Aurel Stein

In trying so hard to win, we have instead become exactly like those whom we hate. The key is to know that there is no need to exert an effort to win; for we were already winners in the beginning when we were not like them. It's when we try so hard to overcome them that we become like them, without realizing that we were already victors in the very beginning. — C. JoyBell C.

We can remove the blocks to realizing our Higher Power by experiencing (including living in the Now), remembering, forgiving and surrendering (these five realizations can be viewed as being ultimately the same). Regular spiritual practices help us with this realization. (138) — Charles L. Whitfield

The study of history can be sobering and shocking, and morally troubling. One does not have to believe in original sin to do it successfully, but it probably helps. By relentlessly placing on display the pervasive crookedness of humanity's timber, history brings us back to earth, equips us to resist the powerful lure of radical expectations, and reminds us of the grimmer possibilities of human nature--possibilities that, for most people living in most times, have not been the least bit imaginary. With such realizations firmly in hand, we are far better equipped to move forward in the right way. — Wilfred M. McClay

The truth of history lies simultaneously in the substratum of created existence (since all beings are the willed realizations of God's love); in the fulfillment of the future of history (since God's love, in His will and its expressions - namely, created existence - is identifiable with the final communion of creation with the life of God); and in the incarnate Christ (since on God's part the personification of this loving will is the incarnate Christ). Whereby Christ becomes the "principle" and "end" of all things, the One who not only moves history from within its own unfolding but who also moves existence even from within the multiplicity of created things, toward the true being which is true life and true communion. — John D. Zizioulas

The only thing that feels worse than being stuck in a situation that makes you unhappy is realizing that you are not ready or willing to change whatever it is. — Ashly Lorenzana

Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we're capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted. — Margaret J. Wheatley

I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again - not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life. — Maggie Nelson

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up. — Diane Meier

I want you to think about this for a minute. What would you rather have? Words that can be spoken lightly and then taken back so easily, would you rather actions? — Katie Ashley

There is a common language, a mode of consciousness, almost a secret sign which can be read and recognized by all who are similarly engaged. Such realizations help fend off the feeling of isolation which can dog the steps of those who seek the Grail. — John Matthews

Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form. — Joseph Campbell

I wasn't sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there was no fixed syllabus. — Jerry Pinto

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion. — Joseph Campbell

We love books because they are the greatest escape. That is because our own minds eye is the purest form of virtual reality. — M.R. Mathias

It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave
and the liar said it really happened
was that once while drinking orange juice, he'd realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar 'realizations.'
Is he kidding? I thought.
Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn't enough.
Once I had food poisoning, and realized I was trapped inside my body. — Amy Hempel

Few realizations are as demoralizing as knowing that the only thing standing between you and what you want is yourself, — Kate Bolick

What you will be in your next life is the sum total of the realizations that you have had in this lifetime. — Frederick Lenz

...The lies we tell, and let ourselves believe, in the name of love.

The first thing you should know is that everyone lies. The second thing is that it matters. — Carla Buckley

ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed. — James Salter

He never told me that he loved me."
"Some men don't," she says. "Some men say it all the time and don't mean it."
I recognize myself in the latter category, not with Demetri but with one of his predecessors. I sometimes said "I love you" to Josh because I was afraid I didn't; toward the end, I hardly said it at all, and when I did I meant, I WISH I LOVED YOU. — Melissa Bank

One of my realizations in such an earthy atmosphere was that many of the burning theological issues in the church were neither burning nor theological. — Brennan Manning

What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes. — Sigmund Freud

One of life's challenging realizations is that sometimes you outgrow your friends. — Steve Maraboli

All good qualities must be sown and cultivated. We can't expect to change overnight from an ordinary person into one with high realizations. — Dalai Lama

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

That day, that moment, opened a curiosity of bodies,
shaped us as irrevocably as our first kiss, our first realizations. You go into that moment never really knowing
if the closeness will wear well, if it is something that should
happen. I know she wasn't sure of me, and I wasn't sure of me, either. But we discovered something in the unspoken,
found care in our caring whispers, instinctive. — David Levithan

Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the better person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him. — Melissa Bank

Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives. — Lewis Mumford

We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range. — Joan Halifax

No matter where we're born, which countries we're raised in, what cultures we come from, there are some universal experiences we all have as children. We all kind of start the same. We want the love of our parents, companionship, friends, we want to have fun, to play, and we're all hurt the first time we learn that the world is far from perfect place - it's the start of a series of epiphanies and realizations that is what growing up is all about. — Khaled Hosseini

One of our most difficult realizations was that - in the course of two years - a connecting hub in St. Louis had gone from something we thought we needed to something we could no longer afford. — Gerard Arpey

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn. — Andrew Solomon

Achievements of life are momentary, but realizations are longer lasting. — Avtarjeet Singh Dhanjal

One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should. — Gretchen Rubin

He realized ... that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious. — Isabel Allende

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience. — Joseph Campbell

True success is there when a person has the ability to lose himself or herself in the search of knowledge and wisdom by using love, joy, and gratitude. On the other hand, societal success comes from the progressive realizations of worthy goals. — Debasish Mridha

Creation from chaos is natural. We've come to a place where we've realized that we have this actual physical need to create things. We've discovered that we hate people en masse, we're sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out. — Renee Rigdon

Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. — Joseph Campbell

When I write about "realizations," I am describing a state in which a practitioner has wisdom of who she or he is, and has embodied that wisdom; it has become integrated into daily life, thoughts, and activities. We often view "awakening" as first step towards such realization. Awakening can occur in the blink of an eye, frequently through the direct, heart-opening (heart-breaking) transmission of grace from an awakened teacher. — Russell Targ

I remember finding myself in situations I all of a sudden feel (remember) I've been in before: a "repeat" life flash.

I remember those times of not knowing if you feel really happy or really sad. (Wet eyes and a high heart.)

I remember, in crowds--total isolation!

I remember, at parties--naked!

I remember body realizations about how fragile we (life) really are (is).

I remember trying to figure things out--(life)--trying to get it all down to something basic--and ending up with nothing. Except a dizzy head. — Joe Brainard

He was free-free to choose to swing from a tree for the afternoon rather than mend fences or train horses. He was free to live. — Elizabeth Michels

The realizations of anarchist ideas and practices are like sociopolitical ecosystems. Local versions resemble each other, but they are endlessly adaptive and everywhere different to meet their needs in their environments. Anarchism can be adapted to meet the culture, economics, ecology, and politics of various people or communities. That's the beauty of it. — Scott Crow

To think you can just go out and help people and somehow get a better life is not reincarnation as I know it. A better life comes from being happy and inner realizations. Now if helping others adds to that, well then, it's great. — Frederick Lenz

He was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and realizations leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities. — Ron Suskind

The awareness that we stand in the presence of the Living God is one of the most important realizations we can install in our operative consciousness. God is always present. The question is, how present are we? We want to stand in that Presence without opacity. Our work is to penetrate, in meditation and in action, to the very heart of being nokhach penei ha-Shem (Lamentations 2:19), of being truly present before God. — Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

I have lost patience with the idea of an insignificant human being standing up above the rest of us
whether he is called Reverend or Doctor or Judge
and shouting at us all about this thing or that. As soon as someone starts to pontificate in this way, I am apt to cut him off or leave the room, or, if this can't be done gracefully, I simply arrange that sweet vapid smile on my face that was so useful during the trial but that so infuriates Dr. Cole. After all, I have already taken the measure of my own insignificance, and I survived. — Charlotte Rogan

I've been offered proof of God's existence at regular intervals in my life through experiences so profound they've given goose bumps to atheists. — Jennifer Skiff

You get so alone at times that it just makes sense. — Charles Bukowski

For much longer, he could have stayed with Kamaswami, made money, wasted money, filled his stomach, and let his soul die of thirst; for much longer he could have lived in this soft, well upholstered hell, if this had not happened: the moment of complete hopelessness and despair, that most extreme moment, when he hang over the rushing waters and was ready to destroy himself. That he had felt this despair, this deep disgust, and that he had not succumbed to it, that the bird, the joyful source and voice in him was still alive after all, this was why he felt joy, this was why he laughed, this was why his face was smiling brightly under his hair which had turned gray. — Hermann Hesse

I get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters' thoughts and realizations, either through thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed. — Adrian Tomine

Yet spiritual realizations often remain compartmentalized, apart from everyday life, or become used as a rationale for living in an impersonal or soulless way. That is why, if we are to live our realizations and bring them into this world, we also need to work on the vessel of spirit - our embodied humanity. Soulwork is the forging of this vessel ... If spiritual work brings freedom, soulwork brings integration. Both are necessary for a complete human life. — John Welwood

I realized I'm in love. It's always been right in front of me. — Richelle Mead

I could not but wonder at the queen's unprecedented civility, until I realized with a flush of shame that it was my own improved behavior that motivated hers. So it is that we in life determine our own treatment. — Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Some realizations can only come from truly looking into the mirror. However, the only thing that the mirror can show one of a false face is the moment before death. Who truly looks into the mirror and sees the painting within it? Who looks into the reflection beyond the looking-glass and see the truth hidden within it? All it takes is one look into the mirror, to come to a realization of truth. But those that do not see the truth, simply falls into another illusion - within an endless refrain. — Lionel Suggs

You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'. — C.S. Lewis

Thus, a vision of the whole gradually grew for me that was nourished by the various experiences and realizations I had encountered along my theological path. I rejoiced to be able to say something of my own, something new and yet completely within the faith of the Church. The feeling of aquiring a theological vision that was ever more clearly my own was the most wonderful experience of those years. — Benedict Cumberbatch

At some point we all have to grow up. Sure, high school might be the best years of our lives the way people say, but when that's over what are we gonna have? An old football career if we don't play college ball and a whole lot of broken people on our conscience. I don't want that.
Maybe there's hope for me after all. — Melyssa Winchester

Being alone & actually sitting with our own thoughts can lead to such growth and realizations that are rare in our everyday busy lives. — Kourtney Kardashian

Dreams are the inner perceptions and realizations that require goal oriented actions and persistence. — Debasish Mridha

I don't pray for anything, but I have used affirmations in the past a few times. They are really a bit more like realizations in that on some level they have already happened. — Eckhart Tolle

Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it is ... or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that's what I see when I look back at my life. An accumulation of everything I went through. — Bhaskaryya Deka

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. — Margaret Atwood

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life. — M. Ageyev

Realizations are strange things. They are composed outside of the conscious self, they are the ends of paths we cannot tread in our waking minds, and for this reason, the most shocking realizations may stab across one's mind, and yet be gone in an instant, fleeting, known-and-unknown. — Moira Katson

The world suddenly opened up, and she was coming to new realizations and a greater awareness, concerning the nature of reality, and the world, which her mortal mind had previously been unable to conceive. She smiled her radiant goddess smile and began to laugh. Her omnipresent peals of mirth resonated through the forest, seeming to echo to the edges of the universe and back. She was getting her first glimpses of the world, seen through the eyes of a goddess; the first sweet tastes of a consciousness empowered beyond all human levels of comprehension, and her spirit was in exultant bliss. — Alexei Maxim Russell

Since God knows created beings as the realizations of His will, it is not being itself but the ultimate will of God's love which unifies beings and points to the meaning of being. And precisely here is the role of the incarnation. The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God's love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ. All things were made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man, the incarnation would have occurred. Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for he represents the ultimate unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God, who intends to lead created being into communion with His own life, to know Him and itself within this communion-event. — John D. Zizioulas

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. — Richard Ford

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer ... but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper. — Silas House

Sometimes, when you're feeling you're lowest, the real you is summoned~And you understand, maybe for the first time ever, how grand you are, because you discover that vulnerable doesn't mean powerless, scared doesn't mean lacking in beauty, and uncertainty doesn't mean that you're lost~These realizations alone will set you on a journey that you will take you far beyond what you used to think of as extraordinary.~There is always a bright side, The Universe — Mike Dooley

I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time. — Marilynne Robinson

Most philosophies wrap their seekers in a strict belief system. By virtue of what they include, they exclude everything else, especially some vital realizations. Periodically revising our philosophy of life as we live it is, therefore, a critically valuable exercise. — Charles Bates

Life was fragile and love was, too. At any moment, even our happiest ones, our world could shatter and we wouldn't see it coming. There was only more loss ahead, showing its ugly face when we least expected it. — Donna Freitas

In the looking, I found the cities within me. — Suketu Mehta

The jobs, the housing, the relationships, the routines --- so many aspects of life that had been cut out of the whole cloth of the war emergency were now so intrinsic that it was easy to believe things had always been this way. Despite the best intentions of returning to their former lives, the come-heres tarried, realizing in small sips of awareness over the course of the war years --- or with great gulping realizations at the war's end abrupt end --- that they would not, or could not, go home again. — Margot Lee Shetterly

I think the moral majority and religious right have been shrinking and having not quite as loud a voice in America, and all of a sudden people are coming to their own realizations going, 'Joe down the street is gay and he's a great guy.' — Jason Priestley

The thing was, the places of your life, like the clothes you wore and the car you drove and the friends and associates you had, were a product of the way you lived. — J.R. Ward

I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

We only betray ourselves. No one is betrayed except by himself. One way to betray yourself is to try to be too many people at once.
"How many people should a person try to be in your opinion?"
One at the most. Most people don't even succeed in that. — MacDonald Harris

It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations ... Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated. — Barbara Ehrenreich

When you're younger, you don't realize you have limitations and that you are the one who has to take care of yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for you. And so, with all of that time, maturity and realizations, I'm in a much better place to be the best that I've ever been and to continue growing as a person and as an artist. — Jennifer Lopez

For better or worse, I tend to do a lot of thinking in my poems. But lately I've been trying to pay more attention to when and where I do that thinking, to be attentive to the settings in which meditation takes place. Sometimes the disconnect between the mind and the world is itself revealing, but in 'The Whole World Is Gone,' I think the setting deeply complements, indeed elicits and allows, a certain set of realizations to occur. — Jennifer Grotz

Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war. — John Milton

A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts. — Jean Cocteau

It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world. — Jason Mraz

I remembered my father's speech about what Jack was capable of and wasn't; he'd said, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW MUCH JACK LOVES YOU. I thought about all the girls he'd stopped loving; it was like he had a timer, and at a certain point it buzzed. — Melissa Bank

I have things planned for every character like what they're doing down the road and coming to different realizations but I don't have how they overlap. — Robert Kirkman

I'm still a political revolutionary. The fire never went out of me, but perceptions and realizations change. — Bobby Seale

In all her attempts to be brave and stay strong, she'd never realized it took more courage to change than to stay the same. — A.B. Harms

The once deep reservoirs filled with our vast emotional understanding have evaporated over the generations and we are now nothing more than a shallow cesspool of impossible expectations — Phillip McCarron

I have spoken to many people who have begun to live in presence, and they find many changes come into their lives. Sometimes these changes happen as inner realizations - "This is what I have to do" - or they arise from the external when something suddenly happens. — Eckhart Tolle