Quotes About Enlightenment

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

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.

You're an emanation of enlightenment. Enlightenment, which is the universe, has created the hallucination that is you in a form that shifts.

Your intent is important. You will pull a very deep power when you are working not just for yourself, but you are working for your enlightenment and to aid others in their enlightenment.

Words are a distraction to enlightenment. Getting rid of conceptual thinking means enlightenment.

How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.

Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment.

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

We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

We do not slight the idea of enlightenment, but the most important thing is this moment, not some day in the future. We have to make our effort in this moment. This is the most important thing for our practice.

Men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

Technology isn't fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.

Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.

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.

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

Obstructions on the way to enlightenment, are you kidding? Hey, they crucify people here. You think this is an easy place?

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).

Broadly speaking, I learned to recognize sin as the refusal to live up to the enlightenment we possess: to know the right order of values and deliberately to choose the lower ones: to know that, however much these values may differ with different people at different stages of spiritual growth, for one's self there must be no compromise with that which one knows to be the lower value.

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.

Through meditative techniques, one can free the mind of delusions and attain what we call enlightenment.

Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.

Be - don't try to become. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

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

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood

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.

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

A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

To start from the self and try to understand all things is delusion. To let the self be awakened by all things is enlightenment.

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.

You remember, you are drawn back to the pathway to enlightenment, to meditation, and when you begin to meditate your past life knowledge returns to you.

God is your very being. So the first thing is, don't think about enlightenment as a goal.

Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.

Protecting the weak is the first step to enlightenment and being truly civilized.

Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before.

Fish sense, applied in the field, is what the old Zen masters would call enlightenment: simply the ability to see what's right there in front of you without having to sift through a lot of thoughts and theories and, yes, expensive fishing tackle.

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However the fish and the bird have never left their elements. Thus each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm... Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish... practice, enlightenment and people are like this.

Unfortunately, the greater consciousness among Whites about Black equality has not carried over to the new victims of racism - Muslims and Immigrants. There is no racial enlightenment for these groups, which are huge. Millions of Muslims and an equal number of immigrants, who whether legal or illegal, face discrimination both legally from the government and extra-legally from White Americans - and sometimes Black and Hispanic Americans. The Democratic Presidential candidates are avoiding these issues in order to cultivate support among White Americans.

The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less.

I hope you will attain enlightenment. I am here to tell you that you already have! But you don't know... The difference between the Buddha and us is the confidence in knowing that he was enlightened.

When you are realized, you can start feeling your own chakras and the chakras of other people. This is enlightenment.

Personal power is the reflection of a person of knowledge. A person of knowledge, an enlightened person, a person even close to enlightenment, has a great deal of personal power.

In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.

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

In short, the enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any 'broader good' such as reflecting God's nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.

The goal of the Transcendental Meditation technique is the state of enlightenment. This means we experience that inner calmness, that quiet state of least excitation, even when we are dynamically busy.

The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision.