Quotes About Enlightenment

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was." - Rumi

Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart and give me, Lord, correct faith, firm hope, perfect charity, wisdom and perception, that I may do what is truly your most holy will.

At the most practical level, a reformed, enlightened, hopeful Catholic Church is essential to the thriving — even to the survival — of the human species.

All mystics have had psychotic breakdowns, although not all psychotics are mystics.

Knowledge is not power

What do you mean exactly? Sounds like you figured something out.

What did the Dalai Lama say when he got an electric shock? Ohm.

If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth.

Dogen tells us to "cease practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself.

Shut your eyes and see.

The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn.

Anything that makes me feel better (or worse) than another is darkness; anything that makes me feel one with others is divine. So the natural instinct to try to lift others by helping them to feel good about themselves relative to others is exactly the wrong way to help. True happiness is found not in a belief that I am better but in the obliteration of any need to be.

As I got closer to it, it got brighter and brighter. It wasn't like any light I could describe to you. It was beautiful.

There is a difference between seeking to know things for the sake of knowledge itself and being willing to undergo renunciation to be possessed by the truth.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.

Quotes. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

The monks who taught me," Hugh explained. "They lived in a monastery in that valley, built between two great trees, trees as eternal as the monks themselves. Under one bower the monks sat to meditate. That tree was called the Tree of Enlightenment. Under the other, the monks drank their wine. That tree was called the Tree of Eternal Life.

I'd realized that laughter was light, and that light was laughter, and that was the secret of the universe.

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

And now," said Julian, when everything was quiet, "I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?

With McClure's support, Steffens embarked on an odyssey. For the better part of three years, he called on people in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and Madison. "My business is to find subjects and writers, to educate myself in the way the world is wagging, so as to bring the magazine up to date," he explained to his father. "I feel ready to do something really fine.