Top 1186 Enlightenment Quotes & Sayings - Page 14

I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews.

I have taken special interest in these accounts [of UFOs].. I think there may be substance to some of these reports... I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on this subject.

This watchfulness, this witnessing is the ultimate secret of creating a religious life, of creating a life of transcendence, a life of spirituality, of enlightenment, of buddhahood.

When there is no thought in the mind, no thought of thought, when the mind is quiet but fully alert, we experience a little bit of enlightenment.

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.

War is unthinkable in a society of autonomous people who have discovered the connectedness of all humanity, who are unafraid of alien ideas and alien cultures, who know that all revolutions begin within and that you cannot impose your brand of enlightenment on anyone else.

Still - and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary - Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

Enlightenment is the culmination of self-knowledge, pure unadulterated knowledge. Not knowledge you can get from reading a book, it comes from perfecting your awareness, your mind.

The joy of suddenly learning a former secret and the joy of suddenly discovering a hitherto unknown truth are the same to me - both have the flash of enlightenment, the almost incredibly enhanced vision, and the ecstasy and euphoria of released tension.

Did you know that according to legend, the guy who became Buddha decided to seek enlightenment the day he got a touch of gray? "Gray hairs," the would-be Buddha said, "are like angels sent by the god of death".

In the new enlightenment, the reason we are driven to become one with the life-process is not merely to experience some form of mystical oneness with everything. We strive to become one with it for the biggest reason there could be - so we can ultimately take responsibility for where it's going.

WHETHER BEINGS LOVE ME OR FEAR ME IS IRRELEVANT. IF BEINGS GIVE ME THEIR ATTENTION I WILL TAKE THEM TO ENLIGHTENMENT AND BLISS.

Pray to God with tears in your eyes whenever you want illumination or find yourself faced with any doubt or difficulty. The Lord will remove all your impurities, assuage your mental anguish, and give you enlightenment.

Enlightenment means that you're living fully, and it means that you die fully. And then you go beyond life and death completely, everything, nothing, all, and beyond all.

What we are seeing in America is the creaky old age of an eighteenth-century settlement, deemed at the time to be the new flowering of humankind-come-of-age (the 'Enlightenment') and so deemed to be above revision. At this point the urgent need is for prayer and prophecy.

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution - Revolution is but thought carried into action. Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass.

If you have a powerful enlightenment experience, do not try to hold on to it, for to do so will take you out of the present moment. You will be caught in the past. You will close the door that gave rise to the experience in the first place.

In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to Spirit.

The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

In Nepal, I realized a certain part of my spiritual search had come to an end. I wasn't ever going to live in a Himalayan cave (I like electricity and a soft bed way too much), and I sure wasn't going to find enlightenment so easily.

Gordon Nelson is not only my friend, he's my mentor. He is a master craftsman with unique experience, and an approach to creativity that we can all learn from. For any hairdresser looking for enlightenment, look no further than a man who worked at the original Vidal Sassoon Salon, and who continues to strive for innovation in the industry.

The Buddha gave his first talks, and three or four ascetics became his first disciples. They recognized his enlightenment.

As an enlightened teacher of Buddhism, I'd like to welcome you to the pathway to enlightenment. I'd like to encourage you to be more positive, to engage in the practice meditation, to learn how to do this wonderful thing - make your mind still in a crazy world.

So I cast my lot with Him-not the one who claimed wisdom, Confucius; or the one who claimed enlightenment, Buddha; or the one who claimed to be a prophet, Muhammad, but with the one who claimed to be God in human flesh. The one who declared, 'Before Abraham was born, I am'-and proved it.

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.

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.

Rather than being any longer a threat to the established androcratic order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.

Greed for enlightenment and immortality is no different than greed for material wealth. It is self-centered and dualistic, and thus an obstacle to true attainment. Therefore these states are never achieved by those who covet them; rather, they are the reward of the virtuous.

The study of enlightenment is really a reorganization of our perceptual body or our perceptual field. We learn to see life more directly and more clearly.

The avoidance of that which causes you pain does not produce enlightenment. It produces avoidance. Religion is the avoidance of pain and suffering.

We play in the jungle gym of sexuality until our spirit takes us out into a clear field where we can see the stars, the ten thousand radiances of enlightenment. One of those radiances is the dance of sexuality.

In a nutshell: if freedom visualised by the Enlightenment and demanded/promised by Marx was made to the measure of the ideal producer; the market-promoted freedom is designed with the ideal consumer in mind; neither of the two is "more genuine" than the other.

Dreams are large possessions ... they are an expansion of life, an enlightenment, and a discipline. I thank God for my dream life; my daily life would be far poorer, if it wanted the second sight of dreams.

We can't say what enlightenment is, we can't say what it isn't, because these are words and words have nothing to do with reality.

Rae Chorze Fwaz was a mystery school. A mystery school is an occult order comprised of people who study meditation, enlightenment and psychic and occult arts.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

There's many lanes on the highway of enlightenment, they don't have to be on the razor's edge like the yellow line dotted in the middle. Balance is appropriate, not too tight, not too loose, the Middle Way as we call it in Buddhist dharma teachings.

Mom takes all the credit for my success. Now Mom says, 'I read your face when you were a baby, and it said you were going to be a star. That's why I named you Ming - because it's all about the sun and the stars and enlightenment.'

Do no harmful actions, do not become attached to the cycle of death and rebirth, show kindness, respect the old and have compassion for the young, do not have a heart that rejects or a heart that covets and have no worry or sadness in your heart. This is what is called enlightenment. Do not seek it elsewhere.

You must learn to meditate and stop your thoughts. You must overcome all egotism and selfishness by serving others. You must cleanse your mind so that enlightenment will find a happy place to reside there.

Matangi's mantra is aim, which is MIA backwards. She fights for freedom of speech and stands for truth, and lives in the ghetto because her dad was the first person in Hindu mythology who came from the 'hood, but had gained enlightenment through not being a Brahmin.

In the past, great communicators were great orators, but great communicators today sound conversational, and interrupting is common in conversation. And public discourse is now more about entertainment than enlightenment.

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights... Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.

Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.

I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.

Instead of striving towards some distant goal that you will never reach, I invite you to stop and ask: How am I avoiding the enlightenment that is already present in each moment? How am I seeing separation where it doesn't exist?

My mother's a Buddhist. In Buddhism, if you want to achieve enlightenment, you have to do it through meditation and self-improvement through the mind. That's something she's passed on to me: to be able to calm myself down and use my mind as my main asset.

You saw me vacillating between error and truth, loving them equally because unable to distinguish the one from the other; the hour marked out by God for my enlightenment has come: He has shown me the powerlessness of reason, and the necessity of faith.

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.

Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience.

The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of 'supernatural' with 'superstition', are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice.

In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.

There is no way to explain enlightenment. It is just a word to indicate something beyond, something very, very far beyond the normal human condition.

Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it and tried its wares before you were ever given your brief run upon it.

A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

An enlightened teacher simply expresses enlightenment in their life by living. It is the student's job to gain the teachings. The teacher's job is just to be perfectly enlightened.

Rama is a fairly common name in India. It symbolizes an individual who is interested both in enlightenment and martial arts. I do not claim to have any past life connection with the historical Rama. It's just a name I liked.

The greatest hypocrisy on the planet right now is for those who defend capitalism to not be in favor of radical transparency, for all of us to know who owns everything. And that is my militant, radical, moderate, pro-capitalist, pro-Enlightenment, ferocious stand.