Quotes About Enlightenment

I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books.

Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know not what it is you say.

There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.

the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Of the many attributes that seem to mark America's founders as residents of a foreign time and place, probably none is more astonishing today than their unapologetic confidence in the power of books—and in particular the books of the philosophers. At

But pantheism is better understood as the idea that God and Nature are two ways of talking about the same thing, and in this sense it is the core religious sensibility of the Enlightenment, from its beginning with Bruno's rediscovery of Lucretius through Locke's proof of a God to the American Revolution. Spinoza did not invent this movement; he epitomized it.

One is not born wise; one becomes it.

He understands that all beings have the power to free themselves from ignorance and unhappiness, but that they don't know it. How

Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless.

Don-Keun was a new man. The moment they arrived, he vanished for a second. We heard muffled ecstatic screaming coming from somewhere in the back of the Waffle House kitchen, then he reappeared, his face shining with the kind of radiance usually associated with religious epiphany.

Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men! -Equality 7-2521

Worry is a waste of emotional reserves. Very foolish. Unworthy of an enlightened person. Since we are merely the creatures of our chemical metabolism and of the economic factors of our background, there's not a damn thing we can do about anything whatever.

The Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore the things which are not known by all do not exist. But we think that the Council of Scholars is blind. The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them. We know, for we have found a secret unknown to all our brothers.

The man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity.

It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity.

Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known even existed.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

Nearly every day I wake up shocked at how little in this world I comprehend.

Without wisdom, brilliance is not enough.