Awakening Quotes

I taught a class about the Tony Awards at a summer theater camp the year after I graduated from high school. So, the first time I was nominated for ‘Spring Awakening,’ it felt like a surreal dream: it was every childhood dream I had come true. It felt like a fairy tale.

When Kubrick called me about ‘The Shining,’ it was very strange. He first asked me to write music for his film, but I instead gave him suggestions about some of my pieces. I told him about ‘The Awakening of Jacob,’ which he did use in ‘The Shining.’

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.

I’m hoping to do more with my music. I did the stage musical ‘Spring Awakening’ recently and it reignited the love I have for singing.

I remember going to a son’s friend’s bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human.

History may someday record that the Arab awakening that began with the Arab revolt of 1916 against the Ottomans ended about a century later with a whimper.

Honestly, I was a little bit arrogant because I came in and thought it was going to be easy and that I’d be on television in a year, no problem. Then you realize how many different things it takes to become a successful superstar, and it really is a rude awakening.

You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that’s the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That’s the American story, again and again.

There’s been an enormous awakening, and I think recognition that the mass shootings we saw in Sandy Hook and other places are very related to the shootings we see every day in our cities.

I was journaling in Florence, and I was like, ‘Oh, I have to come out of the closet. I have to break up with this guy’ – he was my ‘roommate.’ So that was my awakening moment, when I stepped into my own skin while in a foreign country by myself and had a very stereotypical moment of revelation.

Awakenings occur when we lose faith in the viability of our institutions and the authority of our leaders. Religious and spiritual awakening gives people a new vision of themselves, which is then transplanted into social action.

When we fall asleep, we withdraw our awareness from its hypnotic fascination with physical sensation, thereby enabling us to listen with our now awakening sixth sense.

It is a law in the universe that a wave of spiritual awakening is always followed by a period of doubting materialism, each phase is necessary in order that the spirit may receive equal development of heart and intellect without being carried too far in either direction.

It was on my first few trips to India that I finally felt as though I was going somewhere where I could be more ‘Indian!’ It was a rude awakening when I realized that people here were way more Indian than I was.

Being in Los Angeles is this brutal awakening, where I feel not good enough as soon as I walk into a room, and I’m wearing the wrong thing, or I don’t have enough make up on. It’s all about image.

In the year of 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.

The rude awakening I got was that this country can determine the fate of anyone by using propaganda on a public that is hungry for lies.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

The dream of democracy has long been enshrined in the hearts of the Egyptian people. It only needed awakening.

‘Basic Black with Pearls’ contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.

Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that’s the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.

If a Labour movement, on a bourgeois basis, has hitherto existed in the country where the new movement is awakening it will certainly not disappear all at once.

It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

I would say ‘Looking’ and ‘Spring Awakening’ are the most important and personal projects I’ve ever been apart of.

It is possible to experience an awakening in this life through realising just how precious each moment, each mental process, and each breath truly is.

Working at ‘Harper’s’ was an awakening experience for me. I genuinely enjoyed the process of putting together a fashion magazine.

For me, my awakening came when I was kidnapped.

I have been involved with ‘Spring Awakening’ for six years. I am 20 now – I just turned 20 in August – and I originally auditioned when I was 14 years old. I auditioned for Michael Mayer, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater.

Adversity will only sharpen our wits and make us more strong-willed, resulting in the political awakening of more Hong Kongers, not to mention the international community’s support.

When ‘The Awakening’ was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author’s home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening – this goes to the first question you asked – the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn’t been resolved yet.

I did ‘Spring Awakening’ on Broadway for about three years, and I did over 500 performances.

When I was doing ‘Spring Awakening’ the first couple of years I was living in New York, I was gay, and I was living with my ‘roommate,’ who was my boyfriend but was my roommate to everyone else.

My awakening to the fight for women’s votes came when I was 13, and the BBC screened a drama called ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ about the suffragettes, with the great Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst. It made a huge impression on me – not just the history, but because of the debates it triggered at home.

After decades of systematic plundering of state property by corrupt oligarchs, the country needs a collective awakening.

Whenever you create some sort of disturbance in the air, there’s an awakening that happens, an opportunity for a conversation, an opportunity to build bridges, specifically, an opportunity to connect different groups that typically wouldn’t connect with one another.

Upon awakening in the morning, I wondered if the proceedings of the night before had been a dream. It was hard to believe that I was the world’s heavyweight champion.

You know how a lot of people say, ‘I lose myself in music,’ or ‘I like to escape,’ but I want my music to be more of an awakening. I want it to make people to be aware of life; I don’t want my music to be a distraction. I want to light a path.

I worked consistently on Broadway from when I was 8 years old through ‘Spring Awakening,’ which I left in 2008.

I was born and grew up in Phoenix, and I left there when I was 17 to go to Interlochen Arts Academy – a boarding school in Michigan – for a year, and then I went to college for a year at The Boston Conservatory and landed the ‘Spring Awakening’ tour midway through my freshman year, which was pretty cool.

My political awakening, if I can be as grand as to call it that, was all about what was happening around me. It wasn’t some romantic, patriotic vision of Scotland going back to what it had been 300 years previously.

I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’, which is dispiriting. That’s a book I don’t want to re-read.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

I remember speaking to a sheik who came back into the political system in late 2008, laid down his arms. His troops became part of the Sons of Iraq, the so-called Sunni Awakening.

Africa is awakening. It’s a huge market of almost a billion people with huge resources and a young population. People spend when they’re young.

I got in trouble with the police, and that was a rude awakening. That was it. I’d seen the bottom of the pit, and it was time to scrape myself out of it.

Some people have theorized that I lurched to prove myself intellectually. But it was not any lurch. It was more a kind of awakening.

Anybody that thinks hanging out with Snoop is fun, is cool, you’re in for a rude awakening because he is the most down to earth, boring dude ever.

I like that ‘Pitch Perfect’ is one of my first forays into film and just being seen in that kind of light, aside from some people who know me from ‘Spring Awakening’ or the other things that I’ve done. I think in so many ways it’s kind of like my own ‘Glee’ or ‘Smash’.

I took a course on ‘Magic, Alchemy, and Astrology’ at Mount Holyoke, and it was a whole new awakening for me, a way of thinking about the world primarily in terms of concepts and words rather than mathematical formulas.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is – literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do… For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it’s probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.

The Arab awakening was driven by youth, organized by technology, and fired by a hunger for political change.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn’t bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn’t know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.

You can have a spiritual awakening and discover a new side of you at any age. And best of all, love can happen at any age. Life can just start to get exciting when you’re in your 40s and 50s. You have to believe that.

The musicals on Broadway have not necessarily been true musical theater. I’m speaking generally, of course: I saw ‘Spring Awakening,’ and I was completely inspired by that.

The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.

When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the ‘Ghost Rider’ comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn’t get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening – ‘How is this possible, this duality?’

I call for the awakening of our people’s ancient soul, capable of opposing a bloodthirsty barbarism.

We are witnessing a great awakening. Millions of Texans, millions of Americans are rising up to reclaim our country, to defend liberty and to restore the Constitution.

Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.

You don’t want to move in with someone and find out that they don’t have auto or health insurance. That’s a rude awakening.

It’s been a journey of great stress and awakening. I have given my blood sweat and tears to ‘Padmavati.’