Quotes About Enlightenment

the sleeper must awaken

I have said: Blow out the lamp! Day is here! And you keep saying: Give me a lamp so I can find the day.

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is 'Thou shalt not question!

That is the beginning of knowledge—the discovery of something we do not understand.

Men, finding no answers to the sunnan [ten thousand religious questions from the Shari-ah] now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

What senses do we lack that we can not see or hear another world all around us?

Nepoznato se u svakom trenutku nalazi posvuda uokolo. Tu treba tražiti znanje.

you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? What is there around us that we cannot—

You have eyes, yet cannot see without light.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh. —FROM "COLLECTED SAYINGS OF MUAD'DIB" BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN

The Mahdi will be aware of things others cannot see," went the prophecy.

There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness, Paul thought.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away. —THE ZENSUFI MASTER

From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

Religion encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question!

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlight enment than the one in which you discover your father is a man with human flesh.

There was nothing of telepathy here, she knew. It was the tau, the oneness of the sietch community, a compensation from the subtle poison of the spice diet they shared. The great mass of the people could never hope to attain the enlightenment the spice seed brought to her; they had not been trained and prepared for it. Their minds rejected what they could not understand or encompass. Still they felt and reacted sometimes like a single organism.

Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements people made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shall not question! We break that commandment daily. Our work is the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity. —Bene Gesserit Credo

Du kannst jemanden, der die Augen verbunden hat, noch so sehr aufmuntern, durch das Tuch zu starren, er wird doch niemals etwas sehen; erst wenn man ihm das Tuch abnimmt, kann er sehen.

Enlightenment comes to even the dimmest. It begins around the eyes, and it spreads outward from there- a sight that might tempt one to lie down under the harrow oneself.

Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.

Und er stand vollkommen frei und warf die Beine. Er strahlte vor Einsicht.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?