Enlightenment Quotes - page 12

Enlightenment is the key to everything, and it is the key to intimacy, because it is the goal of true authenticity. (Marianne Williamson)
From a mind filled with infinite love comes the power to create infinite possibilities. We have the power to think in ways that reflect and attract all the love in the world. Such thinking is called enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a process we work toward, but a choice available to us in any instant. View quote
Marianne Williamson
Enlightenment is not only timeless but also more beautiful, truer, and more indestructible than anything separable or conditioned. There is no greater happiness than the full development of mind! View quote
Lama Ole Nydahl
The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance. View quote
Tariq Ali
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment. View quote
Elon Musk
Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment. View quote
Dōgen
It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception. View quote
Douglas Hofstadter
Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival. This quest for enlightenment must begin now. It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late. View quote
Richard Matheson
Such as contribute most to human progress and human enlightenment consume no more bread than the simplest of their fellow mortals. Indeed such men are often in want. How many a genius has perished inarticulate because unable to stand the strain of social conditions where animal standards prevail and "survival of the fittest" means, not survival of the "fittest in time-binding capacity," but survival of the strongest in ruthlessness and guile - in space-binding competition! View quote
Alfred Korzybski
Everything, however complicated - breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests - is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn't offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws. View quote
Martin Rees
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
I firmly believe that the higher [spiritual] experience can to a certain extent be prepared for by absolute devotion in the material world to another human being. Thus from the most worldly point of view and with no comprehension of the higher life of the spirit, the lower, more terrestrial spirit makes us aware that all the treasures of this life, all that fame, wealth and health can bring are nothing beside the happiness which is created and sustained by the love of one human being for another... but as the joys of human love surpass all that riches and power may bring a man, so does that greater spiritual love and enlightenment, the fruit of that sublime experience of the direct vision of reality which is God's gift and grace, surpass all that the finest, truest human love can offer. View quote
Aga Khan III
They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. View quote
Carl Sagan
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. View quote
Anthony Bourdain
I am not a racist... In the past I permitted myself to be used... to make sweeping indictments of all white people, the entire white race and these generalizations have caused injuries to some whites who perhaps did not deserve to be hurt. Because of the spiritual enlightenment which I was blessed to receive as a result of my recent pilgrimage to the Holy city of Mecca, I no longer subscribe to sweeping indictments of any one race. I am now striving to live the life of a true...Muslim. I must repeat that I am not a racist nor do I subscribe to the tenants of racism. I can state in all sincerity that I wish nothing but freedom, justice and equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people. View quote
Malcolm X
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." View quote
Yasunari Kawabata
The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in "the discarding of words", it lies "outside words". View quote
Yasunari Kawabata
The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. View quote
Richard Dawkins
The only loyalty to enlightenment consists in disloyalty. This can be partly understood from the position of its heirs, who look back on the "heroic” times and are necessarily more skeptical of the results. To be an heir always carries a certain "status cynicism” with it, as is well known from stories about the inheritance of family capital. (Peter Sloterdijk)
Because there are no truths that can be taken possession of without a struggle, and because all knowledge must choose a place in the configuration of hegemonic and oppositional forces, the means of establishing knowledge seem to be almost more important than the knowledge itself. ... The demand to universalize the rational draws it into the vortex of politics, pedagogy, and propaganda. With this, enlightenment consciously represses the harsh realism of older precepts of wisdom, for which there was no question that the masses are foolish and that reason is to be found only among the few. Modern elitism has to encode itself democratically. View quote
Peter Sloterdijk
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object-to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage” in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. View quote
Peter Sloterdijk
The question about "good origins” becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit. View quote
Peter Sloterdijk
Enlightenment does nothing more than eavesdrop on likely wolves in their dressing rooms, where they put on and take off their sheep's clothing. View quote
Peter Sloterdijk