Quotes About Enlightenment

Enlightenment is finding that there is nothing to find. Enlightenment is to come to know that there is nowhere to go. Enlightenment is the understanding that this is all, that this is perfect, that this is it. Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. You are already there - you have never been away. You cannot be away from there. God has never been missed. Maybe you have forgotten, that's all. Maybe you have fallen asleep, that's all.

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

By nature, it's impossible to describe enlightenment! How do you plan on sharing your enlightenment? Hahaha, that's impossible. Wake up! That'll be the end of the world if you ever succeed!

I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

In Zen Buddhism, the greater your doubt, the greater will be your enlightenment. That is why doubt can be a good thing. If you are too sure, if you always have conviction, then you may be caught in your wrong perception for a long time.

Instant enlightenment. A quintessential modernism, culture and religion accommodated to the age of fast food and bumper stickers. But psyche and spirit are not so exempt from the natural domain that they can simply produce self-change instantaneously, on demand. Wisdom precipitates through a notoriously slow apparatus of retorts and flasks, and it has to find receptive ground only in a properly seasoned mind.

The recurrence during the eighteenth century Enlightenment of the aspiration to be the 'Newton of the moral sciences' testifies to the prestige not just of celestial mechanics, but of the 'experimental method' more generally.

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.

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.

The fountain of information lies at your fingertips and is accessible anywhere at anytime and schools need to emphasize this. We are no longer in a world where you need to go seek enlightenment, it is everywhere.

You can't make a date with enlightenment.

People get very deep experiences and they think they're enlightened. That's not enlightenment, that's just some realization.

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

The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.

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".

Simply by performing good actions and thinking good thoughts you will not attain enlightenment. It takes something more.

As for enlightenment, that's just for people who can't face reality.

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

Enlightenment after all is to overcome delusion, by way of sensitizing practitioners to complexities and problems of the human situation.

Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment; Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self needs strength.

There's a strong nativist tradition - saying, "we have to protect ourselves" - that comes from the founding of the country. If you read Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the United States and the most distinguished representative of the movement here, he actually advised that the newly founded republic should block Germans and Swedes because they were too "swarthy" - dark.

The United States cannot reshape other countries in its own image and that, with a few exceptions, its efforts to police the world are neither in its interests nor within the scope of its resources. This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable.

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

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.

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.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.

Neither my life of luxury in the palace -nor- my life as ascetic in the forest were ways to enlightenment.

Most people don't care much about enlightenment and the truth. They'd rather watch the Home Shopping Network, and maybe that's another kind of truth.

Enlightenment is the realization of the oneness of being, where otherness disappears.

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.

I would encourage you to follow the pathway to enlightenment, to learn to meditate, to practice mindfulness, and not to really care what anybody thinks about you, including yourself.

This is a time of great confusion, of great darkness; other networks are slipping in through other dimensional planes. Soon the network of enlightenment will leave this earth.

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

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

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.

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.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

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.

My "drop in the ocean" will contribute to the enlightenment of Europe, so to speak.

The advanced education in Tantra obviously has to do with the entrance into samadhi, the negation of the self. That is what the path of negation means, not the negation of life, but the negation of anything that is not enlightenment.

One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

Relationships are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit's blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit's laboratories in which he brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth.

There are two obstacles to enlightenment: 1. Thinking you know. 2 Thinking you don't know.

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.

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.

All souls do not reach enlightenment. Some souls reach a certain point and stay there. Some souls actually decline and go into different cycles.