Quotes About Enlightenment

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

When we begin to genuinely appreciate the illusory, dreamlike nature of our waking experiences, we are starting to mix those appearances with the appearances of our nighttime dreams. We are bringing those two states closer together.

It is vital to understand that however positive this worldly life, or even a small part of it, may appear to be, ultimately it will fail because absolutely nothing genuinely works in samsara.

All methods of Buddhism can be explained with the four seals—all compounded phenomena are impermanent, all emotions are pain, all things have no inherent existence, and enlightenment is beyond concepts. Every act and deed encouraged by Buddhist scriptures is based on these four truths, or seals.

It's vital always to bear in mind that we practise for the sake of all other beings, and that the enormity of this aspiration is what makes dharma practice both extremely powerful and inexhaustible, virtually guaranteeing that the result will be infinitely beneficial.

It is not appropriate to ask a Buddhist, "What is the purpose of life?" because the question suggests that somewhere out there, perhaps in a cave or on a mountaintop, an ultimate purpose exists. The

Although it is nonreligious and nontheistic, it's difficult to present Buddhism without sounding theoretical and religious. As

Outwardly we should practise the shravakayana, inwardly the bodhisattvayana and secretly the vajrayana.

it looks dualistic, but it has that ability to liberate you from the bondage of dualism.

If I had done nothing more than bring McCabe 's talents to the attention of what has become a world-wide audience--if I had done only this job, I believe I'd have established myself as a force for mass education and enlightenment with immediate and constructive effects on the thinking portion of the population. My association with McCabe has been enough to build a career for anyone. { Julius on legendary scholar Joseph McCabe }

And think how he has been brought up-, free from all the superstition and ignorance that lead men to hate one another in the name of God.

Kant's articulation of the synthetic a priori put an end to Hume's skepticism and set the stage for the full flowering of German thought in Hegel, who reintroduced Logos to the post-Enlightenment West and simultaneously set the stage for the emergence of the German nation in 1871.

The history of Argentina is a history of struggle between Hispanic Catholicism, symbolized by the monument, and the cabal of Jews and Freemasons that came to be known as the Enlightenment

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

The world is not a prison house; it is a spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell G-O-D wih the wrong blocks.

For above all the dread and uncertainty in which ignorant people lived like children in the dark – frightened of witches and wizards, of the Devil and evil spirits – above it all was the bright starlit sky of the new faith, showing them the way.

In the two hundred years that followed the Enlightenment, more mysteries of nature were studied and explained than in the preceding two thousand years. But what you must never forget is the importance for our own lives of tolerance, reason and humanity – the three fundamental principles of the Enlightenment.

The song of the future must transcend creed.

I have always been like the Greeks and didn't know.

He did not know, but presently he would know. Great is information, and she shall prevail.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself.

The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.

Nothing enrages Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. All over Chandrapore that day the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community. Pity, wrath, heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated.

efforts not so much to acquire knowledge as to dispel a little of the darkness by which we and all our acquisitions are surrounded.