Quotes About Enlightenment

Investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine .

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a scientific hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. Reason became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

Ignorance is not bliss; it's a missed opportunity

The madness of faith is a very different thing from the madness of Enlightenment Reason.

Young men rushed to enlist, not just to have a go at the British, but also to assert the intellectual supremacy of Enlightenment France.

You really believe in the power of books, don't you?" "Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.

First you understand the Dhamma with your thoughts. If you begin to understand it, you will practice it. And if you practice it, you will begin to see it, you are the Dhamma and you have the joy of the Buddha.

Someone commented: I can observe desire and aversion in my mind, but it's hard to observe delusion. Ajahn Chah replied: You're riding on a horse and asking where the horse is?

You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is—and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind.'   8.

Each day move a little more from tightening to lightening.

The spiritual path is not a learning curve. It is a refresher course. You were born knowing. Then you were educated out of knowing. Now you need to be reeducated into remembering. The journey of enlightenment is not one of doing. It is of undoing. You must undo the debilitating illusions that have been laid over your majestic self. The goal of living is to become what you already are.

You are not here to work. You are here to awaken.

Knowledge is power, but wisdom is peace.

Without going outside, you may know the whole world. Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven. The farther you go, the less you know. Thus the wise know without traveling; See without looking; Work without doing.

The answer is simpler than you think.

LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I'm recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of – it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one – but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me.

For the most part, the people who are currently in Satan's kingdom don't realize where they really are, because it is a kingdom of darkness, and they can't "see" it. In contrast, the kingdom of God is the kingdom of light; therefore, those who are in His kingdom know where they are.

The Sun has come to represent enlightenment and salvation across many cultures. I think that if we remove such comforting concepts we are required to do more soul searching but eventually our eyes become accustomed to the dark and our lives become richer.

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

By refusing to accept white dominance in our schools, places of work, communities, and, yes, among those whites who consider us friends, we both show a due regard for our humanity and often convey enlightenment to whites deeply immersed in the still-widespread, deeply held beliefs of a white-dominated society.

Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance

Do you ever have those moments where suddenly you make a quantum jump in understanding, where you see the world so differently that you cannot imagine how you could have perceived it any other way before? Do you have those times when this new understanding makes you feel as though up until that moment you must have been deluded or asleep or just plain stupid? I