Quotes About Enlightenment

The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only those, who have heard the voice of Socrates across the centuries. The others are a superior kind of cattle.

Education is in no small measure preparing the way for the intellectual life and pointing to it. Those who cannot enter in at its gates are doomed, in Leonardo da Vinci's words, to "possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world." For them life must be short, however many its years, and barren, however plentiful its acts. Their ears are deaf to the call of the indwelling Reason, and their eyes are blind to all the meaning and the values of human experience.

What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not die, or want to die. That, too, was mine; and it also is to the good. For that experience resolved proportions and relationships for me as nothing else could have done; and it is surprising, approaching the final enlightenment, how little one really has to know or feel sure about.

An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.

The revolutionary generation believed, to a man, that freedom and reason are the necessary preconditions of truth.

Man wird nicht dadurch erleuchtet, daß man sich Lichtgestalten vorstellt, sondern durch Bewusstmachung der Dunkelheit.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.

Numinous experience elevates and humiliates simultaneously.

Tibetan Book of the Dead

However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

Only Gnostics and contemporaries qualify, for they alone are both severed from their unconscious and aware of the fact.

The Yogin realizes that all the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Devatas with which he has filled the heavens are Maya illusion just as the world itself is Maya. All this plurality is illusion.

With a painful slice, I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretative loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meaning that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

In the imperishable, infinite, highest Brahman, two things are hidden: knowing and not-knowing. Not-knowing perishes, knowing is immortal; but he who controls both knowing and not-knowing is another.51

Man is never helped in his suffering by what he thinks for himself, but only by revelations of a wisdom greater than his own. It is this which lifts him out of his distress.

You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read.

This light that could be either enlightenment or madness fills my head.

the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.

In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.

In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. "The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life," Dreyfus and Kelly worry; "it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.

The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life," Dreyfus and Kelly worry; "it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.

Forse un giorno si arriverà ad essere tutti sereni, e non capiremo più tante cose perché capiremo tutto.

Enlighten yourself and you will enlighten the viewer. - Jean-Christophe Ammann