Quotes About Enlightenment

There is no pride,' said the lama, after a pause, 'there is no pride among such as follow the Middle Way.

What I learned is ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance. You can't help or contribute to this planet without knowing what's really going on.

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. And finally

May my spiritual senses develop day by day, becoming more and more keen and enjoyable. May my taste for You become stronger and sweeter. May my sight of You become clearer, my spiritual ears more sensitive to Your voice.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.

One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

Kannon, with her thousand arms and eleven heads, who could hear the voices of things crying out. I said I could totally relate to that, and when she told us that Kannon was the Buddhist saint of compassion

Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, made a deep vow to free all beings and help us wake up to our true and luminous nature.

I felt it wouldn't kill me to learn something before I died

gaté gaté, para gaté, parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . . These words are actually in some ancient Indian language71 and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this: gone gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . . I

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

When I wash my feet May all sentient beings Attain the power of supernatural feet With no hindrance to their practice.   Of

We stand in darkness, surrounded by light

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity.

Qué es entonces la cultura? Yo siempre la he considerado como el camino que ha de recorrer un individuo para llegar al conocimiento de sí mismo; y muy poco le servirá a quien no quiera emprender ese itinerario el haber nacido en la más ilustrada de las épocas.

he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in the most enlightened age.

If learning lessons from history is a mark of enlightenment, so is breaking free from it.

if wisdom was easy any fool would be able to do it.

had sought, and with that comprehension came a new clarity, a return to sanity, and even a kind of wisdom.

How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.