Quotes About Enlightenment

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

Rasta is to know. Rasta is to answer, which is the final step.

What was most important and really new about the Age of Reason was the sublime confidence of the intellectuals and societal leaders in the power of man's reason

We need to appreciate the Enlightenment's broader, richer notion of happiness and make it again about finding one's place in the world, enjoying what we have and what we see in it, and appreciating the beauty of the Earth during our short time on it.

Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, "To be enlightened was to be filled with hope."54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was "superstition, intolerance, tyranny."55

Light, God's eldest daughter...

The master Wen-yu summed it up when he answered a demand for the First Principle of Ch'an with, "If words could tell you, it would become the Second Principle.

There's no escaping the Taoist adage, "Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak.

Quietistic meditation is easier, naturally, but a person who practices it will turn out to be just as insecure and petty as someone not enlightened at all. What is equally important, "leisure-time" meditation that separates our spiritual life from our activities is merely hiding from reality. You cannot come home from the job and suddenly turn on a meditation experience.

According to Ch'an (and Zen), understanding comes only by ignoring the intellect and heeding the instincts, the intuition.

the only way to really understand the message is to stop trying to "understand" it.

Extinguish desire and suffering goes with it.

Only in a spontaneous utterance is there real, uncalculated evidence of enlightenment.)

The astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. ("The Medusa")

From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

And I succumbed to an ecstatic horror at this insight.