Quotes About Enlightenment

The practice is enlightenment. Some people find this idea not to their liking. They want to get enlightenment in a flash. This way they become attached to something that doesn't exist. Enlightenment isn't a thing you get.

Each river is different, but they all eventually lead to the ocean. No matter what we’re doing or when, or whether it brings us happiness or remorse, gain or loss, we’re all on our individual paths to enlightenment. Even when we’ve done something we consider wrong, we’re still on our path to enlightenment.

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We could also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all, and that the entire universe is alive.

What matters is that you meditate, you're seeking enlightenment, you're on the pathway to enlightenment, and you're having fun. Don't look for reassurance in the eyes of others. Look for reassurance in your own eyes. Only you know if Buddhist practice is improving the quality of your life.

The Buddha would never speak about enlightenment. The way he taught people about enlightenment was they meditated with him. He exposed them to countless views of the nagual.

In this world, there is a fine line between enlightenment and brain damage.

After enlightenment, the laundry.

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

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

The network of enlightenment is a very wide network. It's not relegated to a simple type of being. It's not the network of the goody-goods.

To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.

No true search for enlightenment ignores the suffering of other sentient beings. Ever. We simply need to create a way to address that suffering while remaining in a blissful center.

I think it's so important to have a practice, because the consciousness isn't perfection or enlightenment or any of that bullshit. The consciousness is, "Oh, I'm walking down the street and I'm doing nothing."

Don't move. Just die over and over. Don't anticipate. Nothing can save you now because you have only this moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now because there are no other moments. With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully. Don't move.

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

If there isn't an emanation of love and joy, complete presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not enlightenment.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

Did you know that according to legend, the guy who became Buddha decided to seek enlightenment the day he got a touch of gray? "Gray hairs," the would-be Buddha said, "are like angels sent by the god of death".

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

Not a few patients, however, suffering from certain forms of mental disorder, regain a high degree of insight into their mental condition in what might be termed a flash of divine enlightenment.

The moment of enlightenment is when a person's dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.

You may have thousands of lives to go between now and before you're a real hard-core seeker of enlightenment, hardcore meaning you just love it.

Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.

Ah! the curse of slavery, as the common phrase goes, has fallen not merely on the black but perhaps at this moment still more upon the white, because it has warped his sense of truth and has degraded his moral nature. The position and the treatment of the blacks, however, really improve from year to year; while the whites do not seem to advance in enlightenment.

The religious wars showed that the Christian faith was no longer Europe's unifying force. A new common ground was needed, and it was found in reason, which is something that is shared by all of mankind. This was one of the roots of the Enlightenment and its concept of universal human rights.

There's no risk in doing a lousy meditation or not meditating at all. There's no risk in being convenient and comfortable. There's a lot of risk in the world of enlightenment.

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.

There's a Buddhist story about the guy who wants to be enlightened, and then he gets a cow and a wife and a child, and all these things get in the way of his enlightenment. So, yeah, I have no chance of being enlightened.

The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.

The Spirit bears witness. Ecstasy and enlightenment, inspiration and intuition are not necessary. Happy is the man who is worthy of these; but woe unto us if we wait for such experiences; woe unto us if we do not perceive that these things are of secondary importance.

Gordon Nelson is not only my friend, he's my mentor. He is a master craftsman with unique experience, and an approach to creativity that we can all learn from. For any hairdresser looking for enlightenment, look no further than a man who worked at the original Vidal Sassoon Salon, and who continues to strive for innovation in the industry.

Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing]; the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment.

In Nepal, I realized a certain part of my spiritual search had come to an end. I wasn't ever going to live in a Himalayan cave (I like electricity and a soft bed way too much), and I sure wasn't going to find enlightenment so easily.

I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.

Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.

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.

I am making an Enlightenment Capsule for the audience to meditate inside - virtual reality in which people can experience ancient ideas from the East... But I'm not interested in using ancient things; rather I want to connect them with contemporary life through the technology we have now.

My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!

Disease an never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion's willful screaming or faith's symbolic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.

If you seek enlightenment, then career is a very important idea on your agenda.

The one and only thing required is to free oneself from the bondage of mind and body alike, putting the Buddha's own seal upon yourself. If you do this as you sit in ecstatic meditation, the whole universe itself scattered through the infinity of space turns into enlightenment. This is what I mean by the Buddha's seal.

The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.

I think that the whole stigma of the name may still burn deep with some of the Native people, but there are some that it doesn't bother. They actually think it brings enlightenment to the contributions that the Native Americans had in the establishment of our country, but I haven't come up with an idea. I'm not saying the name "Redskins" wasn't derogatory, but the actual changing the name to the Washington Redskins was an honorary move.

Well it's always been an interesting area for me. In referencing something I just reread from Dogen it says, "Enlightenment doesn't break the person anymore than the reflection breaks the water" and Suzuki in his commentary is saying you don't lose your personality once you acquire some sort of Buddhist understanding.

That which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low order of man, that which constitutes human goodness, human nobleness, is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness; it is self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal indulgence, personal advantage, remote or present, because some other line of conduct is more right.

As Americans we place special emphasis on human dignity, justice and freedom. WE measure as good of bad that which meets these goals. Those high ideas have survived and flourished on this soil for two centuries since the Founding Fathers planted them because we have sustained a general public enlightenment through a free and universal public school system.