Quotes About Enlightenment

For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

I spent two years in Cairo, and I felt a certain urgency about trying to understand the region and the conflict here, in the modest way that a journalist might be able to try and shed some understanding and enlightenment on a region that is profoundly conflicted, and a conflict that has real consequences for Americans.

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

Do you want some advice? Go home. You're far too inquisitive, and here in East Carmine curiosity only ends one way. Death? Worse - enlightenment.

The only thing you really get to figure out after a lifetime of study is that there's more stuff to figure out. Frustrating and enlightening at the same time.

The circumstances of confusion will be your path to enlightenment' - Thursday Next

Information can liberate but also imprisonate.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.

Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.

That's what I like about a well-educated man. If he contemplates the obvious long enough, he finally gets a clue.

The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.

Dans un roman tout s'explique, même le plus mystérieux, surtout le plus mystérieux; non seulement il s'éclaire, mais il éclaire tout le reste. Dans la vie de la route, le plus simple reste mystérieux.

It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see a man somehow emerging from oblivion by his own efforts, dispelling with the light of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him, rising above himself, soaring in his mind right up to the celestial regions, moving, like the sun, with giant strides through the vast extent of the universe, and, what is even greater and more difficult, returning to himself in order to study man there and learn of his nature, his obligations, and his end.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

But so long as power remains by itself on one side, and enlightenment and wisdom isolated on the other, wise men will rarely think of great things, princes will more rarely carry out fine actions, and the people will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy.

I found everything perfectly clear, and I really understood absolutely nothing.

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?