Enlightenment Quotes

Only love can be shared, and the attempt to 'share' an illusion is literally impossible.

~ David Hoffmeister

When a man has many women in his life to cater to, one of them is bound to come last.

~ Terry A. O'neal

The mind that is deceived believes that this world is real. It believes that it is a real person and that there are real events that are happening to it. I really lost my job; I really do not have enough money to pay the rent. That is how it feels. It really does not see it as a dream. When we go to bed at night and dream, do we react to the dreams? There is running and sometimes fear and lots of emotions that seem to go on in those dreams. Why? Because the mind thinks it is in the dream. If you really let go of judgment you will start to see more and more that you are the dreamer of the dream, you are the cause of the dream. If I am in the dream it does not seem like I am the cause of the dream and I am not in control of it, but if I step back and realize that I am the dreamer of the dream, then I can accept another purpose for it. OK, I am going to change the purpose – out with the ego and in with the Holy Spirit! The Course calls that the happy dream. There is nothing on the screen that has changed, there are still the same things going on, what the world describes as wars and so on but my purpose for the world has changed.

~ David Hoffmeister

No spiritual master who ever walked the earth has anything on you. You're the complete package, the real deal. You just don't remember it yet.

~ Carrie Triffet

So pervasively has Enlightenment culture’s anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.

~ Craig S. Keener

We effect more than we can possibly know. With every mood, every thought, every word, every gesture, we change our lives and our universe.

~ Maharishi Sadasiva Isham

May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are alllost, and still we are guided—by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way—the hero’s journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here.

~ Elizabeth Lesser

And also, to encompass the madness within, let us reach forth our minds.

~ Rae La Rae

Dare to learn.Dare to relearn.Dare to outlearn.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

~ Lytton Strachey

Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.

~ Emanuel Swedenborg

I’ve heard that sometimes a version of you must die before another more enlightened version can be born. I think that’s true after watching the corpse of myself walk around.

~ Julie Flygare

Education provide enlightenment for one's life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When the human condition is finally demystified, human insecurity and nervousness will be at a maximum…for this ultimate enlightenment to be allowed, society is going to have to adhere scrupulously to the democratic principle of freedom of expression.

~ Jeremy Griffith

You have eternity to experience your awakened self. So why not enjoy the dream while you’re in it, even if it is limited?

~ Teresa Tsalaky

Education is provide enlightenment for one's life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is an enlightened way to flow with, in, and through conflict.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The unseen essential awaits your enlightened heart's ascension to love.

~ Bryant Mcgill

If a man wanted to put the entire universe in his breast, he couldn't do it with his chest stuck out.

~ Eiji Yoshikawa

Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun. Nirvana is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering.When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun. The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again.

~ Namkhai Norbu

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

~ Jill Lepore

God’s love supersedes all religions and it is the core of all religions.

~ Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

Enlightenment doesn’t make us a better person if we seek it just for us. It doesn’t erase our desires or put an end to even our own suffering. In fact it is the suffering that ennobles us.

~ Balroop Singh

I am seeking spiritual awaken and enlightenment from the Creator.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You will not die if you abandon them. You will not lose if you abandon them. You will gain something greater. If you do not abandon them you will never reach enlightenment, nor find your self that is at peace.

~ Woo Myung

All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.

~ Namkhai Norbu

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves.

~ E.t.a. Hoffmann

But I wish to be enlightened.''Let me caution you against it.''Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?''Yes, indeed.'She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement.

~ Thomas Hardy

It is the same principle as washing dirty clothes - the more you clean the dirt away, the more it goes back to its original state. A piece of paper, which has been scribbled on, gets cleaner the more the scribbling is erased. Enlightenment is the same as knowing the true state of the paper once it is clean.

~ Woo Myung

[To think for oneself] is the maxim of a reason never passive. The tendency to such passivity, and therefore to heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest prejudice of all is to represent nature as not subject to the rules that the understanding places at its basis by means of its own essential law, i.e. is superstition. Deliverance from superstition is called enlightenment; because although this name belongs to deliverance from prejudices in general, yet superstition especially (in sensu eminenti) deserves to be called a prejudice. For the blindness in which superstition places us, which it even imposes on us as an obligation, makes the need of being guided by others, and the consequent passive state of our reason, peculiarly noticeable.

~ Immanuel Kant

Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal.

~ Andrew Louth

There is a great difference between enlightenment and education. The former is a discerned vital knowledge without guidance while the latter is imparting any knowledge.

~ Uzoma Nnadi

When humanity finally emerges from the Middle Ages altogether, when he stops connecting psychic behavior withthe work of the Devil or with some unknown, unmentionable force, then he will emerge into the New Age of enlightenment.

~ Daniel Logan

Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Enlightenment is not an attainment, it is a realization. And when you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes.

~ Dan Millman

Sandals. The Sufi teacher Ghulam-Shah was asked what pattern he used in formulating his courses for disciples. He said: 'Barefoot until you can get sandals, sandals until you can manage boots.

~ Idries Shah

We don’t look at the sky anymore, instead we stare at boxes that keeps us captive; we don’t walk barefoot any more, we refuse to kiss the earth with our feet, we keep busy worrying and fearing, we exist and die, like robots we work and consume. We ignore the beauty of a butterfly and the power of the eagle, we have forgotten the scent of flowers, we are too busy to enjoy nature, we are plastic most of the time; we live together but we do not connect, we are asleep. I want to cleanse myself of societies’ noise, walk barefoot, and kiss the earth with my feet, I want look at the sky, and like my ancestors, I want to feel free. I want to rejoice of who I am, and what I will become.

~ Martin Suarez

Love, not balance, brings enlightenment

~ Nicholas C. Rossis

    In a thousand years or ten thousand, no one would remember my nation. It, too, would share in oblivion and prove to not matter, to never have mattered.    The same for my species, and the earth, the universe, and God. When the last star winks out, none of it will have mattered - and it ten billion years, I will still be nothing - and equal to God.     That was the first stage in my enlightenment: to understand that nothing matters. Hence, everything is equal.

~ Rory Miller

Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.

~ Shelby D. Hunt