Quotes About Enlightenment

What is your aim in philosophy?---To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

I had come to see a beautiful liberation in this new way of thinking—which was, ironically, not having to think for myself.

Christ and Buddha

Only after several years of training did I come to realize that the deepest purpose of the martial arts is to serve as a vehicle for personal spiritual development.

The people need a master only as long as they have no understanding of their own. The more it acquires understanding, the more the government is bound to change its methods and to disappear. The most noble end of government is to become dispensable, so that everyone must govern himself.

If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance....These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of truth....In such manner did I dream of the truth.

Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them.

As we learn to embrace our authentic longings and feelings— and cultivate self-empathy and the corresponding compassion toward others—our society will gradually evolve in a direction that is more tolerant, humane, and enlightened.

A mind so dark it made one wonder if the Renaissance had ever really taken place.

Sam Keen points out that Zen masters spend years to reach an enlightenment that every natural child already knows—the total incarnation of sleeping when you're tired and eating when you're hungry. What irony that this state of Zen-like bliss is programmatically and systematically destroyed.

Education makes all the difference.

President Abraham Lincoln said, "I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment.

His closing his eyes to me, opened my eyes to him.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing

When the True Lord Himself grants forgiveness, then one does not have to enter the cycle of reincarnation again.

Meditation is a death - death of all that you are now. Of course there will be a resurrection, but that will be a totally new, fresh original being which you are not even aware is hidden in you.

On waking from the dream, we see that birth and death, the sense of self, other - all of these things fade away.

I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.

This is the secret of the golden flower: if the heart can die the flower will bloom, die as you are so you can be reborn.

Saying of the ProphetDeathDie before your death.

Now that I no longer desire all, I have it all without desire.

When nothing upsets you, you are at the beginning of the path. When you desire nothing, you are halfway on the path; when nothing becomes everything, you are perfected.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery, caught in the desire, you see only the manifestations.