Quotes About Enlightenment

After several months of dwindling fortunes, and deserting troops, the final defeat of the Emperor's army took place at the Battle of Helsa, near Bodhgaya, the site of the Buddha's Enlightenment, on 15 January 1761. Here the imperial army was finally cornered by several battalions of red-coated sepoys.

Enlightenment meant criticism, a belief that nothing was beyond rational improvement, and that nothing was justifiable that could not be shown to be useful to humanity, or to promote human happiness.

God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.

Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can

I was a sunburnt pagan now. I felt privy to mysteries.

Simplicity is never to be associated with weakness and ignorance. It means reducing tons of ore to nuggets of gold. It means the light of fullest knowledge; it means that the individual has seen the folly and the nothingness of those things that make up the sum of the life of others. He has lived down what others are blindly seeking to live up to.

I keep [a] subject constantly before me," Newton once remarked, "and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

El Buda examinó el fenómeno del ser humano examinando su propia naturaleza. Dejando a un lado toda idea preconcebida, exploró la realidad interior y descubrió que cada ser es un compuesto de cinco procesos, cuatro de ellos mentales y uno físico.

el Buda examinó también la mente y encontró que, en términos amplios y globales, constaba de cuatro procesos: consciencia (viññ??a), percepción (sañña), sensación (vedar?) y reacción (sa?kh?ra).

Three parts of the Noble Eightfold Path fall within the training of s?la: right speech, right action, and right livelihood.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

For a frequent intercession with God, earnestly beseeching him to forgive the sins of all mankind, to bless them with His providence, enlighten them with His Spirit, and bring them to everlasting happiness, is the divinest exercise that the heart of man can be engaged in.

I don't like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.

We cannot attain the presence of God. We're already totally in the presence of God. What's missing is awareness.

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as 'enlightenment.

Alexander Berkman was a self-declared atheist attempting to lift the stultifying fog of the gods from the mind of humankind.

Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods

the Principle of Mediocrity opposes the pre-Enlightenment arrogance of believing ourselves significant in the world; the Spaceship Earth metaphor opposes the Enlightenment arrogance of aspiring to control the world.

Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.