Quotes About Enlightenment

Sex can never bring about enlightenment. Only enlightenment brings about enlightenment.

If enlightenment comes first, before thinking, before practice, your thinking and your practice will not be self-centered. By enlightenment I mean believing in nothing, believing in something which has no form or no color, which is ready to take form or color. This enlightenment is the immutable truth. It is on this orginal truth that our activity, our thinking, and our practice should be based.

You are a Buddha, and so is everyone else. I didn't make that up. It was the Buddha himself who said so. He said that all beings had the potential to become awakened. To practice walking meditation is to practice living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and enlightenment are one. Enlightenment leads to mindfulness and mindfulness leads to enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

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.

A purpose derived from a false premise - that a deity has ordained submission to his will - cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals - solving our world's problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition - provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.

Anything but enlightenment is pure pain; it is the lack of enlightenment. There are joys, of course, and they should be enjoyed. There are sorrows, and they should be passed over briefly.

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

The anti-pleasure movement in self-discovery is very strong. I have big news for them, if they ever get to enlightenment, which is unlikely the way they're approaching it, they're going to find that enlightenment is very pleasurable.

Anything but enlightenment is pure pain; it is the lack of enlightenment.

To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist. One must be willing to release one's mind and soul from one's body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.

After enlightenment, the laundry.

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.

There's a path in enlightenment called the path of negation where we intentionally throw ourselves into experiences that are extremely transient. In other words, we do all the stuff you're supposed to normally avoid to become enlightened, intentionally.

Nirvana and enlightenment exist just on the other side of your sensory perceptions and your thoughts.

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.

The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying. Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor.

The most fundamental challenge of the anthropocene concerns agency. For those who lived the Enlightenment dream (always a minority but an influential one), agency was taken for granted. There were existential threats to agency (e.g., determinism) but philosophy mobilized to refute these threats (e.g., by defending libertarianism) or to defuse them (e.g., by showing that they were compatible with agency).

This is something I consider Enlightenment to be - and that is to give intellectual or spiritual understanding and to be free of ignorance, false beliefs or prejudice. Able to honor each person as they walk their own path and not infringe our own personal beliefs onto them but to accept what ever form that carries truth for them

Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject.

I realize that I've had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

This is a world that defines everything backwards, a world in which good is called bad, brightness is called darkness, up is called down, enlightenment is called abnormal behavior and abnormal behavior is applauded as reason.

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.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is.

Paradoxically, the more deeply one grows in enlightenment, the more clearly one discerns one's own frailties and limitations.

No one's life is totally morbid. Even on a subtle scale there's little flashes of enlightenment and of happiness and joy.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

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

Art is a necessity, an essential part of our enlightenment process.

The pathway to enlightenment is beautiful. There are a lot of wonderful things that happen along the way. Win or lose, you just keep going, and it happens eventually.

When light engages the heart, it causes an illumination of the path, a purification of the consciousness, an enlightenment of the intellect and an establishment of the foundations of dhikr and shukr and of beautiful worship.

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.

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.

Every moment gives birth to the next moment and influences it. Getting out of that chain of perpetual being is getting off the wheel of birth and death. That is enlightenment.

You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your inner enlightenment.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment. That is why we often fear to open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much.

There is no one way to salvation, whatever the manner in which a man may proceed. All forms and variations are governed by the eternal intelligence of the Universe that enables a man to approach perfection. It may be in the arts of music and painting or it may be in commerce, law, or medicine. It may be in the study of war or the study of peace. Each is as important as any other. Spiritual enlightenment through religious meditation such as Zen or in any other way is as viable and functional as any "Way."... A person should study as they see fit.

A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass

I think Enlightenment as an epistemic ideal involves rejecting the appeal to a fundamental stratum of non-conceptual self-evidence.

One of my purposes is to use the television show as a voice to not only entertain people, as I did in the beginning, but as a source of information, as a source of enlightenment, wherever we can, and also as a source of lifting people up wherever you can.

Without doubt machines will be able to determine the means and avenues to goals, but men will continue to set the goals themselves. For what machine can ever apply the considerations of compassion and justice which, as man's enlightenment spreads ... will enter ever more into the decisions that affect his future ... in the universe?

Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.