Quotes About Enlightenment

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.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

the remark of a Middlesex Regiment officer in 1918. "Intelligence services," the man had said, "are prone to looking up their own arses and wondering why it's dark.

El sufrimiento condena a la lucidez.

El propósito de la encarnación física es el desarrollo de una conciencia superior.

We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.

Nowadays, it's almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom – at least in the abstract (in practice, of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions.

Want-- I want-- I want, we want to wake up, to wake out of it, to wake into the light, I want to dip, to bathe my everything in light--

1992) Wen-tzu: Understanding the Mysteries. Trans. T. Cleary. Boston: Shambhala.

The Master leads by emptying people's minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know.

As Chuang Tzu put it: "In the deep dark the person alone sees light."87

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.15

So the learning of complete people is to return their essential nature to non-being and float their minds in spaciousness.41

It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom—if there be such—it seems to be the right book.... Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning.

Thomas Merton characterized it: "One breaks through the limits of cultural structural religion ... [where one experiences] a kind of limitlessness.... lack of inhibition, ... psychic fullness of creativity, which mark the fully integrated maturity of the 'enlightened self.' "116

And so, there is nothing to practice because we are always already enlightened, always already Absence somehow open to the world.

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.

Is there a vaccine for ignorance and stupidity?

Death is no cure for ignorance.

A spiritual renaissance is long overdue.

You don't need to find an "enlightened one" to tell you what to think - you are an enlightened one. We all are.

David J. Ridges

it is a response to a reality beyond us. Far from being trapped in tribal illusions, we are liberated by transcendent truths.

Ex Scientia Lux Lucis (From Knowledge Comes Enlightenment)