Top 100 The Enlightenment Quotes
#1. Is the basic teaching of Buddhism - on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment - really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation?
Thomas Merton
#2. The quest for enlightenment illustrates the paradox of desire - the fact that you must have desire to be motivated to transcend being ruled by desire.
Paul O'Brien
#3. No matter how long you live, no matter how mature or philosophical you may grow to be, almost all sudden enlightenment will feel precisely this way, like a boot in the stomach, like acid on your tongue, and the sooner you accept this the better off you'll be.
Ron Currie Jr.
#4. Those who are actively seeking enlightenment will not find it because the act of looking for it is the distraction from it.
Enza Vita
#5. Enlightenment is the unfolding of the divinity within.
Michael Sharp
#6. Enlightenment is already there inside us and all things. All we have to do is get something out of the way that is causing us not to see that.
Frederick Lenz
#7. For the first time, we live in a society that shows any sign of the possibility of women changing this condition.
Frederick Lenz
#8. To deal with someone from other infinites is problematic at times, to deal with a true master of all the realms of the yogas. We call them someone with the seven seals of enlightenment, meaning that their gradated perception has past through all the realms.
Frederick Lenz
#9. You will bring yourself the suffering you need to bring yourself so that you may awaken.
T. Scott McLeod
#10. Do not look for happiness outside yourself. The awakened seek happiness inside.
Peter Deunov
#11. If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.
Johann Most
#12. If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty-bound to spread around like manure. Fertilize those young minds!
Meryl Streep
#13. If there isn't an emanation of love and joy, complete presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not enlightenment.
Eckhart Tolle
#14. Enlightenment is when there is no personal self, only the Creative Self, which is universal and impersonal in nature. It is when the personal self or personality is no longer the point of reference, but rather it becomes a tool to realize the True Self and to do its Creative Will.
David Cherubim
#15. 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.
Frederick Lenz
#16. Many women devlop the second attention, attract a great deal of sexual attention, and for many years, appear to be very vibrant and strong.
Frederick Lenz
#17. The teacher has nothing to do with people who use their mental powers to block the enlightenment of others. These people lack control. What can you teach someone who lacks control?
Frederick Lenz
#18. Enlightenment is just the beginning, later on come other skills ... patience, a forgiving nature, extreme attention ...
E. J. Gold
#20. There's no right or wrong in the study of enlightenment. There's only experience.
Frederick Lenz
#21. Do you wish to take control of your life? Begin by focusing on steering the storm, rather than where the lightening strikes.
Gary Hopkins
#22. Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.
Adyashanti
#23. Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.
Mark Twain
#24. Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#25. We play in the jungle gym of sexuality until our spirit takes us out into a clear field where we can see the stars, the ten thousand radiances of enlightenment. One of those radiances is the dance of sexuality.
Frederick Lenz
#27. The United States is the result of an enlightened philosophy; China is the outcome of traditions and history.
Patrick Mendis
#28. The people to become enlightened in Atlantis lit the "flame of enlightenment" on earth for the first time. The members of the various mystery schools have kept the flame alive by passing on the secret techniques for attaining enlightenment from the time of Atlantis to our present day.
Frederick Lenz
#29. Only a development of thought achieved through the self-education of the whole man can prevent any body of thought whatsoever from becoming a poison; can prevent enlightenment from becoming an agent of death.
Karl Jaspers
#30. The goal of the soul is to work toward enlightenment.
Jodi Livon
#31. Finally, a principal reason for the lack of attention to "unclean spirits" and Jesus' "acts of power" in the Gospel stories is surely the modern "scientific" frame of mind that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment reduction of reality to what was natural and comprehensible by reason.
Richard A. Horsley
#32. [Josiah P. Mendum memorial at Paine Hall]
[He turned] the strait-laced Boston of sixty years ago [into] the enlightened Hub of today, ... to 'destroy bigotry and uproot the evils of superstition.
Josiah P. Mendum
#33. The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Theodor Adorno
#34. The things that come to us easily, our propensities, are carried on a deep subconscious level into our next life. There are no coincidences.
Raquel Cepeda
#35. SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.
Ambrose Bierce
#36. Shouldn't those who were born to expect death be the sole subjects of gleaning?" went the popular wisdom. But it was bigotry masquerading as wisdom. Selfishness posing as enlightenment.
Neal Shusterman
#38. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox
#39. Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
Socrates
#40. Only the rich can achieve enlightenment because the poor are too busy looking for fridge freezers.
Rajneesh
#41. The dreams of eternity are the states of mind. When we wake up from the dreams there's only enlightenment. There could never be anything else.
Frederick Lenz
#42. Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.
Adam Nevill
#43. The family gives you ambition, and ambition is one of the hindrances for enlightenment. It gives you desires, it gives you a longing to be successful, and all these things create your tensions, your anxieties: how to be a celebrity?
Rajneesh
#44. Through reading the scriptures, we can gain the assurance of the Spirit that that which we read has come of God for the enlightenment, blessing, and joy of his children.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#45. Enlightenment is a destructive process. It
has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the
crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing
through the facade of pretence. It's the
complete eradication of everything we
imagined to be true.
Adyashanti
#46. Enlightenment is the ability to comprehend ourselves, it is the power to peer into our hearts and minds and reach that state of spiritual bliss, which may or may not lead us to salvation.
Balroop Singh
#48. There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
James Buchan
#49. The Buddha achieved enlightenment as he sat under the spreading limbs of the Bodhi tree, breathing in and out in silence, as does a tree.
Nalini M. Nadkarni
#50. People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross- legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.
Shunryu Suzuki
#51. Kundalini can be transmitted. A person who is very adept at the enlightenment process can transmit it. Whether you feel it or not, it's affecting you in a very positive way.
Frederick Lenz
#52. There's not really a whole lot you could say about liberation. The closest experience you can have of it is to come meditate with someone who is liberated.
Frederick Lenz
#53. The prayer that is heard is not of many words ... but of Oneness
Vivian Amis
#54. I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.
Charles Jencks
#55. The Encyclopedia
the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment ...
Peter Prange
#56. If a man wanted to put the entire universe in his breast, he couldn't do it with his chest stuck out.
Eiji Yoshikawa
#57. To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#58. People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful, And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.
Brad Warner
#59. The more we try and understand enlightenment the more it will elude us. And that's because enlightenment does not come from the mind. It comes form 'no-mind.' It comes form just being. You are already enlightened. You just have to realize it to allow it into your experience.
Anita Moorjani
#60. The soul knows only to love. While the ego criticizes everything, including the ego itself ...
Akemi G
#61. The process of education takes place in the field of consciousness; the prerequisite to complete education is therefore the full development of consciousness - enlightenment. Knowledge is not the basis of enlightenment, enlightenment is the basis of knowledge.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#62. I believe in the Enlightenment, Devra. And I don't think that's gonna change. Not now. Not ever.
Felicia Hajra-Lee
#63. Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.
Joan Halifax
#64. Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European Enlightenment is more important than people.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#65. If you go through life expecting nothing chances are you'll be content most of the time.
Mark W. Boyer
#66. We are all blessed ones. Heaven is no longer in the clouds. It is right here, all around us, everywhere; we must only open our eyes to see it.
Kim Chestney
#67. Walking away from bad situations and negative people sets a healthier tone for the rest of your life. It also gives those who do not know any better the opportunity to self-correct.
Gary Hopkins
#68. This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale
Christopher Hitchens
#69. We are figments of the same imagination ... We are one
Gary Hopkins
#70. Normally the experience of enlightenment occurs in stages. A person will usually have many small enlightenments before full enlightenment dawns.
Frederick Lenz
#71. As a woman you must unite with other women for a while and perhaps even reject the world of men, just to balance yourself.
Frederick Lenz
#72. The world is perfect, and at the same time, it is in a constant state of unfolding. This is also true for you and me. Our quest for enlightenment is really just a re-connection with something that already exists in us.
Victor Shamas
#73. 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
Carlos Castaneda
#74. Once humanity discovers what's behind the mirror of all the ruling class of governments and religions there will be a new beginning of justice called Enlightenment.
Charleston Parker
#75. I feel part of the environment, not separate from it, as though I'm at home rather than visiting - as though I'm tapped into some eternal omnipresence beyond the transient physical forms.
Michael Sanders
#76. If it's real enlightenment ... you're dealing with someone who's broken through every rule, every barrier, every do and do not, and they've reached an apex of consciousness. They've broken through all the conditioning, all the timidity. They don't buy into any program.
Frederick Lenz
#77. The fearful seek to serve themselves by mastering the world, while the fearless seek to serve the world by mastering themselves.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
#78. If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is 'the quiet acceptance of what is'.
Wayne Dyer
#79. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
Eckhart Tolle
#80. There are many paths that lead to enlightenment. There are lesser enlightenments along the way to a larger enlightenment, referred to sometimes as liberation.
Frederick Lenz
#81. Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
Walter Isaacson
#82. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Umberto Eco
#83. The origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but the roots of the Enlightenment can be found in habits of mind cultivated in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and the institutions that grew from them.
Ibn Warraq
#86. Smartass Disciple: Master, please show me the way to the enlightenment.
Master of Stupidity: Walk with me! [but I won't let you try to surpass me].
Toba Beta
#87. Some souls attain enlightenment. No one knows why. You could say it is individual inclination. I'm not convinced that's the case.
Frederick Lenz
#88. We've got to stand up not only for free speech, but also for all that we've inherited from the Enlightenment and from Christianity.
Roger Scruton
#89. It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. ... We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
Henry David Thoreau
#90. True enlightenment is nothing but the nature of one's own self being fully realized.
Dalai Lama
#91. The high-priests and priestesses of Atlantis had discovered many of the deepest secrets of the universe. They had come to understand all about reincarnation, karma, and the innermost workings of the Enlightenment Cycle.
Frederick Lenz
#92. It is my sincere desire that my research and hard work will help create a world where we all learn to walk this Earth, safe, enlightened and free from the perils of cruelty, ignorance, and all the other dark and sinister forces, which make assholes possible.
Alexei Maxim Russell
#93. Be enlightened for you, just for you. No one else knows or cares. They crucified Christ, you know. They don't take real well, on this planet, to the people who see things differently.
Frederick Lenz
#94. The Enlightenment taught that observation unrecorded was knowledge lost.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#95. In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.
Thomas Merton
#96. Good humor and enthusiasm should be the sunshine ahead that will keep that shadow behind.
Charles W. Field
#97. Forces of light on earth shall overcome the force of darkness. Complete spiritual enlightenment on earth will occur.
Edgar Cayce
#98. The inward offer is a kind of spiritual enlightenment, whereby the promises are presented to the hearts of men, as it were, by an inward word.
William Ames
#99. I have spent much of my adult life trying to figure out how to experience holiness, and now I know that the struggle to figure things out is antithetical to the experience. You simply relax into holiness the way you would a warm bath.
Victor Shamas
#100. Today, as never before - the information media having become to enlightenment as the cereal aisle is to the supermarket - if you choose not to access the past, you are de facto free to rule it out of existence, at least so far as you might be concerned.
Jack Womack
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