Enlightened Quotes - page 13
this satsangh?' You just drop that. You don't have to get anything, okay? You don't have to benefit from this. Just waste half a day and go. (Laughter) Really. ‘What should I get out of my meditation?' Nothing. Just waste fifteen-twenty minutes every day. So do not meditate; just learn to waste some time. Nothing needs to happen. This is not about resting; this is not about becoming healthy; this is not about becoming enlightened; this is not about reaching heaven. All this is just wasting time. When you are not trying to be anything, not trying to get anywhere, you are being.
Jaggi Vasudev
What human motivation is responsible for getting the most wonderful things done? I would say greed. When I use the term greed, I do not mean cheating, stealing, fraud and other acts of dishonesty, I mean people seeking to get the most for themselves. One might be tempted to use "enlightened self interest” but I like greed better. Unfortunately, many people are naive enough to believe that it is compassion, concern, and "feeling another's pain" that's the superior human motivation. As such we fall easy prey to charlatans, quacks and hustlers.
Walter E. Williams
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Nelson Mandela
All your problems come down to love. Your love life is what your problem is, and everybody else's on earth. God in existence is man and woman. There's nothing else. And unless you have loved God in existence - your duality which is woman or man - unless you have united with that through love and devotion without going through your feelings of love, you're not going to be enlightened.
Barry Long
Enlightenment can't be pursued or sought after. [...] Truth is here now; no past, no future. People are unenlightened only because they believe in the truth of the past and therefore must look to the rewards of the future. To be enlightened, to return to the original state of life on earth, requires action now in the present with no reference to the past. What has to be done is to kill the old priest in you, starve out the traditionalist, the follower, the believer.
Barry Long
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general Impossible and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, and. prove it abundantly.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Concerning the blunders which had been made in our foreign policy public opinion is, as a rule, first enlightened when it is in a position to look back upon the history of a generation, and the Achivi qui plectuntur are not always immediately contemporary with the mistaken actions.
Otto von Bismarck
Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament - and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude - as individuals and as a Nation - for our attitude is as essential as theirs.
John F. Kennedy
I should have thought that if there was one country in the world where property was more secure than another, it was this country, because it is at heart a justice-loving country and because it is a country in which men's hearts have neither been wholly spoilt by social wrong nor wholly hardened by wealth out of all responsiveness to social obligations. Therefore, it is a country with the will and capacity to move quickly and steadily forward along the path of social reform towards a fairer and more enlightened common life, free from the disgrace of the existence of unnecessary and unmerited misery and poverty.
Henry Campbell-Bannerman
The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused. Newspapers, magazines, and circulating libraries have made mankind wiser. Titles and distinctions, ranks and orders, parade and ceremony, are all going out of fashion.
This is roundly and frequently asserted in the streets, and sometimes on theatres of higher rank. Some truth there is in it; and if the opportunity were temperately improved, to the reformation of abuses, the rectification of errors, and the dissipation of pernicious prejudices, a great advantage it might be. But, on the other hand, false inferences may be drawn from it, which may make mankind wish for the age of dragons, giants, and fairies.
John Adams
The founding fathers of the State of Israel considered the principle of equality and the pursuit of peace as the bedrock of the society they were building. What happened? ... I still believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, nothing has really changed since 2004. Instead, we now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don't think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today.
Daniel Barenboim
Most black men couldn't balance a checkbook
But buy a new car, talking 'bout, 'How my neck look?'
Well, it all looks great
Four hundred years later, we buyin' our own chains
The light is before us brothers, so the devil workin' hard
Real family stick together and see through the mirage
The smokescreens, perceptions of false reality I've been woken from enlightened man's dream
Checkin' Instagram comments to crowdsource my self-esteem
Let me not say too much or do too much
'Cause if I'm up way too much, I'm out of touch
I'm prayin' a out-of-body experience will happen
So the people can see my light, now it's not just rappin'
God, I have humbled myself before the court
Drop my ego when confidence was my last resort.
Kanye West
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people - the best people, the most enlightened people - do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Michael Crichton
I recall a conversation with a scientist who so insistently wanted to be the defender of modern science that he even attempted to diminish the significance of all ancient accumulations. Whereas, precisely, each young representative of modern science must first be open to everything useful and more so to all that bears the testimony of ages. All negation is contrary to creativeness. In his enlightened, constantly progressive movement, a true creator, first of all, is not negative. A creator has no time for condemnation and negation. The process of creativeness proceeds in an unrestrained progression. Therefore it is painful to see how a man, because of certain prejudices and superstitions, entangles himself with phantoms. In order that no one might suspect a scientist of being old-fashioned, in his fear he is ready to inflict anathema and oblivion upon the most instructive accumulations of the experiences of antiquity. Ch. 1 Fearlessness.
Nicholas Roerich
The angel had told me in my dream that if I wanted to acquire the perfect knowledge I desired, I would have to go to the Moon. There I would find Adam's paradise and the Tree of Knowledge. As soon as I had tasted its fruit, my mind would be enlightened with all the truths a person could know. That is the voyage for which I built my chariot.
Finally, I climbed aboard and, when I was securely settled on the seat, I tossed the magnetic ball high into the air. The chariot I had built was more massive in the middle than at the ends; it was perfectly balanced because the middle rose faster than the extremities. When I had risen to the point that the magnet was drawing me to, I seized the magnetic ball and tossed it into the air again.
Cyrano de Bergerac
In an age when national greatness depends not on numbers or on territory, but on intelligence, the development of intelligence is a duty the neglect of which will hazard our national position. In a day when thought, not force, is the ruler of mankind, and when in domestic government numbers are more powerful than wealth, it is of the most vital importance to the stability of our institutions that that thought should be sound and those numbers enlightened.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain-these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, "What shall it profit a man?" carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.
R. H. Tawney
Before taking up our subject as outlined at the close of the previous volume, I would like to speak a word as to the symbolism we will employ in discussing egoic and personality control. All that is said in this connection is in an attempt to define and consider that which is really undefinable and which is so elusive and subtle that though we may call it energy or force, those words ill convey the true idea. We must, therefore, bear in mind that, as we read and consider this treatise on psychology, we are talking in symbols. This is necessarily so, for we are dealing with the expression of divinity in time and space, and until man is consciously aware of his divinity and demonstrating it, it is not possible to do more than speak in parable and metaphor with symbolic intent - to be ascertained through the medium of the mystical perception and the wisdom of the enlightened man.
Alice Bailey
In Seattle, there's a sense of community that's not competitive. It's very enlightened, if you ask me. Chris Cornell could have shut Eddie [Vedder] out and said, "No, Soundgarden gets all the glory now". But he got up onstage with the newcomer and built his confidence. It helped Eddie grow those wings pretty fast.
Chris Cornell
