Quotes About Enlightenment

Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven't made much progress there—though I need to.

It's not the answer that enlightens, but the question. EUGENE IONESCO

God must become an activity in our consciousness. JOEL S. GOLDSMITH

The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, See?

Art ... illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, See?

Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident.

Apropo, cum preferati, autodistrugerea prin lipsa cunoasterii sau prin acumularea cunoasterii de sine?

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.

Knowledge is freedom and with freedom comes understanding.

There is learning in everything

To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean "to think", but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one's consciousness into it.

Wisdom is an ethics of knowledge

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house; and you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look! Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet; if you can't find where your soul is hidden, for you the world will never be real!

Nindak niyare rakhiye aangan kuti chhawaye; Bin sabun pani bina nirmal karat subhaye.

As long as a human being worries about when he will die, and what he has that is his, all of his works are zero. When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead, then the work of the Teacher is over.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) Have the courage to use your own understanding, is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

The Sufis, the Sunni mystics with whom the Ismailis felt great affinity, had an axiom: "He who knows himself, knows his Lord.

people are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need.

A truly compassionate person touches a chord in us that resonates with some of our deepest yearnings. People flock to such individuals, because they seem to offer a haven of peace in a violent, angry world. This is the ideal to which we aspire, and it is not beyond our capacity. But even if we achieve only a fraction of this enlightenment and leave the world marginally better because we have lived in it, our lives will have been worthwhile.

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.

All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who belong to your own class or those you find congenial) was the test of true spirituality.

true insight does not consist of the acquisition of information but comes from mastering our egotism and greed.5

When I heard this I became very sad, but I thought that now I would indeed have to take him with me so that the Virgin herself could enlighten him.