Enlightenment Quotations

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.

Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.

The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness, more human enlightenment than from any other way.

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

Everybody wants to get enlightened but nobody wants to change.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

To me, the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.

Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet.

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive - that you can touch the miracle of being alive - then that is a kind of enlightenment.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.

If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

I don't believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Unity consciousness is a state of enlightenment where we pierce the mask of illusion which creates separation and fragmentation. Behind the appearance of separation is one unified field of wholeness. Here the seer and the scenery are one.

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

I want to offer the possibility that Jesus was truly, as he proclaimed, a savior. Not the savior, not the one and only Son of God. Rather Jesus embodied the highest level of enlightenment.

Since it is the practice of enlightenment, that practice has no beginning and since it is enlightenment within the practice, that realization has no end.

That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion; that the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment.

It shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks. Life is not easy. The road to happiness is not a path well trotted. You have to find your own path to enlightenment.

Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.

Even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don’t seek to become free or desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become present.

Enlightenment means choosing to dwell in a state of presence rather than in time. It means saying yes to what is.

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space.

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.

Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.

Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks you to find perfection right where you stand.

The road to enlightenment is paved with authenticity, not imitation.

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

Dualistic doctrines that regard mind and body as separate entities do not provide much enlightenment on the nature of the disembodied mental state or on how an immaterial mind and bodily events act on each other

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

Its taken 14 billion years for matter to gain the capacity to become conscious of itself. If this is true, it wouldn't make any sense that the whole point of enlightenment would be to escape from the whole process at the very instant that the universe is beginning to awaken to itself.

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.

Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.

To relate is to react. To react is to understand oneself. To understand oneself is to be enlightened. Relationships are schools for enlightenment.

Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.

A person must earn enlightenment, Eragon. It is not handed down to you by others, regardless of how revered they be.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain

The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.

Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism . ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.

No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

Life is not about focusing on the obstacles. It's about how you handle them, and whether you get enlightenment or levity from the way you do it

If you ever reach enlightenment. will you remember how to laugh?

The goal of society in general is to succeed in the world, whereas the goal of enlightenment is to transcend beyond it.

Every human being has consciousness, but not every human being has the same amount. The potential for each one of us human beings is infinite consciousness. This is called supreme enlightenment, and it just needs unfolding by transcending each day. The more consciousness we have, the better life is.

You may have expected that enlightenment would come ZAP! instantaneous and permanent.This is unlikely.After the first ah ha expereince, it can be thougth of as a thinning of a layer of clouds.

The person who says, 'I'm enlightened' probably isn't.

A flash of enlightenment offers a preview of coming attractions, but when it fades, you will see more clearly what separates you from that state - your compulsive habits, outmoded beliefs, false associations, and other mental structures. Just when our lives are starting to get better, we may feel like things are getting worse - because for the first time we see clearly what needs to be done.

Enlightenment is scary. Sometimes things look better in the dark.

I am who I am who I am who am I Requesting some enlightenment Could I have been anyone other than me?

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

There is a flaw with words, they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment

The real pleasure,the real peace, the real enlightenment is to give. The more you give the more you get. If you give 10, you get 100.

We are approaching a time when Christians, especially, may have to declare the social contract between Enlightenment rationalists and Biblical believers - which formed the basis of the constitution written at our nation's founding - null and void.

Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don't look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.

Anything that is created must sooner or later die. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.

The attainment of enlightenment from ego's point of view is extreme death.

If we really prefer basic sanity or enlightenment, it's irritatingly possible to get into it.

The trouble with Westerners is that they want to witness their own enlightenment.

We need to learn that truth consists not in correct doctrine, but in correct doctrine plus the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.