Quotes About Enlightenment

We did not just go to the stars. We became the stars.

I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.

The world is lightening, taking shape, and turning to color.

enlightenment always tastes of freedom.

How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.

What would you rather? yelled Sybil from the distant sandpit. Know everything or know nothing? Know nothing, I yelled back. Then you have the fun of finding everything out.

Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.

I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.

The truly inspired priest is the man or woman with the big brain.

A window in Merton's mind let in that strange light of surprise in which we see for the first time things we have known all along.

Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh;

Religions are like glow-worms: they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers,magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

On account of its originality, excellence in every field strikes us as so new and so strange, that to recognize it at first glance will require not only understanding, but also education in the same discipline. As a rule, excellence achieves late recognition, all the later as the discipline is loftier, and those who truly enlighten humankind share the fate of the fixed stars, the light from which requires many years before it descends to the horizon.

Din flac?ra purificatoare a durerii, negarea voin?ei de a tr?i, adic? eliberarea, izbucne?te ca un fulger.

What I have here described with feeble tongue and only in terms, is no philosophical fable, invented by myself, and only of today; no, it was the enviable life of so many saints and beautiful souls among Christians, and still more among Hindus and Buddhists and also among the believers of other religions.

what remains after the complete abolition of the will, for all those who are still full of will, assuredly nothing. But conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of our with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.

The Buddha, Eckhart and I all teach essentially the same, Eckhart within the bounds of his Christian mythology. In Buddhism, these ideas are not encumbered by any such mythology, and are thus simple and clear, to the extent that a religion can be clear. Complete clarity lies with me.

We must not even evade it, as the Indians do, by myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahman, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing

the one thing that will finally make you feel you aren't missing something essential, such as the point.

Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.

It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.

America's tiny reign of terror, Salem represents one of the rare moments in our enlightened past when the candles are knocked out and everyone seems to be groping about in the dark, the place where all good stories begin.

He was the world-renowned tamer of lightning, the man who had disarmed the heavens, who had vanquished superstition with reason.