Enlightenment Quotes

Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment. (Morihei Ueshiba)
Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment. View quote
Chogyam Trungpa
Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm. View quote
Idries Shah
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. View quote
M. H. Abrams
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. View quote
Virchand Gandhi
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. View quote
Nhat Hanh
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints. View quote
Will Durant
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground. View quote
D. T. Suzuki
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment. View quote
Christopher Lasch
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. View quote
Wendell Willkie
I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it's been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it's voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big-and takes on that damned capital C-they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths. (David Gerrold)
Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion. View quote
Theodor Adorno
[I am a humble adherent of]...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism. View quote
Ernest Gellner
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
It isn't at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation. View quote
Edward Said
I think with all the odd jobs I ever had, there was some kind of enlightenment but, yes, a lot of pain and suffering that I don't want to re-live. View quote
David Boreanaz
Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn't it? View quote
Scott Lynch
We who don't want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community. View quote
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness. (Nikos Kazantzakis)
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Enlightenment says the world is nothing Nothing but a dream, everything's an illusion And nothing is real. View quote
Van Morrison
There is no enlightenment outside of daily life. View quote
Nhat Hanh
Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.' View quote
David Brin