Enlightenment famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
-- Adyashanti -
Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.Â
-- Adyashanti -
It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.
-- Adyashanti -
Enlightenment means waking up to what you truly are and then being that.
-- Adyashanti -
We need to learn that truth consists not in correct doctrine, but in correct doctrine plus the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
We practice to learn how to let go, not how to increase our holding on to things. Enlightenment appears when you stop wanting anything.
-- Ajahn Chah -
The road to enlightenment is paved with authenticity, not imitation.
-- Alan Cohen -
Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks you to find perfection right where you stand.
-- Alan Cohen -
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
-- Alan Watts -
You can't buy enlightenment, but you can hire a mirror so you can watch it happen.
-- Alek Wek -
Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
-- Allan Bloom -
It can be made only when one recognizes the ground of being itself, when one recognizes directly that One is All.
-- Amit Goswami -
Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.
-- Amy Chua -
Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.
-- Andrei Tarkovsky -
The more we try and understand enlightenment the more it will elude us. And that's because enlightenment does not come from the mind. It comes form 'no-mind.' It comes form just being. You are already enlightened. You just have to realize it to allow it into your experience.
-- Anita Moorjani -
No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.
-- Ann Druyan -
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
-- Anne Lamott -
Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain
-- Anthony Bourdain -
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
-- Anthony Bourdain -
Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.
-- Anthony de Mello -
When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions.
-- Atifete Jahjaga -
You must continue to go back to the beginning, to the foundation, and question the foundation. Even once you‘ve reached Samadhi you must go back so you can create it at will. Samadhi is the beginning of spiritual growth, not the end. You must always be questioning. Enlightenment comes as an accident at first, then you have to learn to recreate it.
-- B.K.S. Iyengar -
Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.
-- Ben Shahn -
Great beauty, great strength, and great riches are really and truly of no great use; a right heart exceeds all
-- Benjamin Franklin -
The real pleasure,the real peace, Â the real enlightenment is to give. The more you give the more you get. If you give 10, you get 100.
-- Bikram Choudhury -
Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.
-- Bill Richardson -
You are asking yourself, as all of us must: 'Who am I?' . . . 'Where am I?' . . . 'Whence do I go?' The process of enlightenment is usually slow. But, in the end, our seeking always brings a finding. These great mysteries are, after all, enshrined in complete simplicity.
-- Bill W. -
Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space.
-- Bodhidharma -
And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.
-- Bodhidharma -
People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.
-- Brad Warner -
As for enlightenment, that's just for people who can't face reality.
-- Brad Warner -
The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.
-- Brad Warner -
Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty.
-- Bruce Lee -
There are massive stacks of bad choices in my backyard. Haven't finished cleaning the place up but I'm workin' on it and clearly I have not yet reached enlightenment for more than a fleeting moment but I'm tryin' and I found somethin' here I want ya to have. It's not much just a story but it's all I've got so take it.
-- Buddy Wakefield -
We are approaching a time when Christians, especially, may have to declare the social contract between Enlightenment rationalists and Biblical believers - which formed the basis of the constitution written at our nation's founding - null and void.
-- Cal Thomas -
Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don't look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.
-- Camille Paglia -
When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.
-- Carl Jung -
Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible. The latter procedure is more difficult and therefore, unpopular.
-- Carl Jung -
There is a flaw with words, they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment
-- Carlos Castaneda -
I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.
-- Charles Jencks -
Good humor and enthusiasm should be the sunshine ahead that will keep that shadow behind.
-- Charles W. Field -
Anything that is created must sooner or later die. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.
-- Chogyam Trungpa -
The Zen of doing anything is doing it with a particular concentration of mind, a calmness and simplicity of mind, that brings the experience of enlightenment and, through that experience, happiness.
-- Chris Prentiss -
The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
-- Christopher Dawson -
A person must earn enlightenment, Eragon. It is not handed down to you by others, regardless of how revered they be.
-- Christopher Paolini -
I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
-- Chuck Palahniuk -
Not a few patients, however, suffering from certain forms of mental disorder, regain a high degree of insight into their mental condition in what might be termed a flash of divine enlightenment.
-- Clifford Whittingham Beers -
Enlightenment isn't found with a full stomach, or on a soft pillow.
-- Conrad Anker -
Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
-- D.T. Suzuki -
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
-- D.T. Suzuki -
I am who I am who I am who am I Requesting some enlightenment Could I have been anyone other than me?
-- Dave Matthews -
Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.
-- David Brin -
Instant enlightenment is to give all your happiness away to others.
-- David Deida -
The goal of society in general is to succeed in the world, whereas the goal of enlightenment is to transcend beyond it.
-- David Hawkins -
Enlightenment is scary. Sometimes things look better in the dark.
-- David Levithan -
Every human being has consciousness, but not every human being has the same amount. The potential for each one of us human beings is infinite consciousness. This is called supreme enlightenment, and it just needs unfolding by transcending each day. The more consciousness we have, the better life is.
-- David Lynch -
The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.
-- Deepak Chopra -
Unity consciousness is a state of enlightenment where we pierce the mask of illusion which creates separation and fragmentation. Behind the appearance of separation is one unified field of wholeness. Here the seer and the scenery are one.
-- Deepak Chopra -
Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.
-- Derrick Bell -
Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is to shed the body-mind of oneself, and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.
-- Dogen -
Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.
-- Dogen -
Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism . ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.
-- Douglas Hofstadter -
When we wake up from our confused state of mind, that is enlightenment.
-- Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche -
Ultimately one must abandon the path to enlightenment. If you still define yourself as a Buddhist, you are not a buddha yet.
-- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche -
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
-- E. M. Forster -
Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
Even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don’t seek to become free or desire or “achieve†enlightenment. Become present.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
Enlightenment means choosing to dwell in a state of presence rather than in time. It means saying yes to what is.
-- Eckhart Tolle -
Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.
-- Edwin Gaustad -
I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
-- Elon Musk -
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
-- Elon Musk -
Enlightenment is not the process of learning 'new' information. It is the process of 'reminding' ourselves that the answers are already 'within our consciousness'. All knowledge, all energy, all information is within us, not outside of us. it always has been and always will be.
-- Eric Allen -
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
-- Eric S. Raymond -
Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.
-- Erik Naggum -
[I am a humble adherent of]...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.
-- Ernest Gellner -
Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro.
-- Frantz Fanon -
Attachment is the main thing that is blocking your path towards enlightenment.
-- Garchen Rinpoche -
Liberals have a set of folk theories that are fallacious. One of them comes from the Enlightenment, and the assumption is that you are supposed to be logical. They assume all you have to do is tell people the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion. This is utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump all the facts.
-- George Lakoff -
When a fully qualified Mahayana disciple relies completely upon a fully qualified Mahayana Spiritual Guide the attainment of enlightenment is easy.
-- Geshe Kelsang Gyatso -
The path to enlightenment is really very simple - all we need to do is stop cherishing ourself and learn to cherish others. All other spiritual realisations will naturally follow from this.
-- Geshe Kelsang Gyatso -
Retreating from the world will not liberate you. Happiness is not found in a secluded forest hut or isolated cave. Enlightenment comes when you connect to the world. Only when you truly connect with everyone and everything else do you become Enlightened. Only by going deeply and fully into the world do you attain liberation.
-- Guo Jun -
Hip-Hop is my vehicle to scientific and universal enlightenment
-- GZA -
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
-- H. L. Mencken -
[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
-- H. L. Mencken -
What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
-- Henry Miller -
Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.
-- Henry Steele Commager -
For each inclosed spirit is a star Enlightening his own little sphere
-- Henry Vaughan -
Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
-- Herbert Simon -
But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.
-- Ho Chi Minh -
I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.
-- Hugh Laurie -
Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.
-- Idries Shah -
There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
-- James Buchan -
It shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks. Life is not easy. The road to happiness is not a path well trotted. You have to find your own path to enlightenment.
-- Jamie Campbell Bower
