Quotes About Enlightenment

You've tapped yourself in some sort of fifth­century religious mania. Since then the Renaissance has happened, the Enlightenment has happened. Where've you been?

Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.

Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.

Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. They are sought out in many cultures and considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment.

It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive.

MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance

There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.

We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe's worth of darkness.

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.

There's light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don't go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.

There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.

I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.

Centuries of enlightenment and progress vanished virtually overnight because Men couldn't find a way to use it wisely and purposefully.

Since the dawn of man, there have always been people bent on harming others. There have been periods of peace and enlightenment, and there have been dark times, but through it all, mankind survived. That cycle has repeated itself over and over. It wasn't always easy, and despite those who would have it otherwise, life went on.

Your destiny is to find the truth.

it's no help to be ignorant of the truth....

Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

That's one form of magic, of course. What, just knowing things? Knowing things that other people don't know.

They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.

They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.