Enlightenment Quotes - Page 19

• Enlightenment is not so much a hard-won achievement, much less a "creation," but instead is deep relaxation and recovery of our natural condition. You come to see the evolution of the soul, the soul's journey, as a realization of what has always been there in the first place.

  Alex Grey

  Recovery, Journey, Achievement

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• Even if we profess to be non-judgmental, there's an inherent judgmentality and hierarchy in which the spiritual person, the conscious person, the mindful person, is more developed than the typical truck driver or waitress or heroin addict. This is a red flag, another problem built into the concept of spirituality. The truth is that every person you meet is in some way more developed than you are, and that the multiple modes of development that a human being can pursue require the whole of humanity to pursue. We're in this together. Enlightenment is a collective effort.

  Charles Eisenstein

  Spiritual, Effort, Humanity

  Source: www.mindfulnessbell.org

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• How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.

  Michael S. Heiser

  Believe, Biblical, Reality

  Source: www.patheos.com

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• Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.

  Mel Brooks

  Funny, Life, Witty

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• The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

  Richard Dawkins

  School, America, Reason

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• The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

  E. M. Forster

  Life, Food, Sleep

  "Aspects of the Novel".

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• Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Inspiring, Education, Patriotic

  Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey (2008). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.86, Courier Corporation

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• Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.

  Immanuel Kant

  Maturity, Divine Guidance, Intelligence

  "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?" by Immanuel Kant, translated by Lewis White Beck, 1784.

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• 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

  Scotland, May, Pages

  Interview with Emma Thompson, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 30, 2008.

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• New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

  John Locke

  Business, Philosophy, War

  An Essay Concerning Human Understanding "Dedicatory Epistle" (1690)

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• Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

  Elon Musk

  Inspirational, Strive, Make Sense

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, Awards

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• 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

  Eye, Insanity, Challenging The Status Quo

  "A chat about the novel 'Fight Club'". www.cnn.com. October 27, 1999.

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• For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

  Steven Pinker

  Civilization, Accomplishment, World

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.737, Penguin

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• The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

  Salman Rushdie

  Church, Weapons, Accepting

  "Salman Rushdie: the fatwa, Islamic fundamentalism and Joseph Anton". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. September 16, 2012.

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• In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Two, Race, Europe

  "Europe’s New Anti-Semitism" by Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 11, 2012.

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• Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

  Michael Shermer

  Survival, Democracy, May

  Michael Shermer (2012). “The Believing Brain: From Spiritual Faiths to Political Convictions – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.”, p.122, Hachette UK

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• The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Good Morning, Stars, Eye

  Walden ch. 18 (1854)

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• To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Pain, Joy, Noise

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.154, New World Library

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• The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Pain, Twenties, Moments

  "Operatic Pop Singer Rufus Wainwright in Concert". www.npr.org. June 9, 2007.

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• Enlightenment is the key to everything, and it is the key to intimacy, because it is the goal of true authenticity.

  Marianne Williamson

  Love, Inspirational, Forgiveness

  Interview with Ken Page, www.psychologytoday.com. January 22, 2012.

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• I don't believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws.

  Tiger Woods

  Believe, Flaws, Achieve

  "Gandhi and Tiger Woods" by Robert Wright, www.slate.com. July 24, 2000.

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• One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

  Martin Filler

  Eye, Age, Theater

  Martin Filler (2007). “Makers of Modern Architecture”, New York Review of Books

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  A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Beauty, Spiritual

  Letter of 1950, as quoted in "The New York Times", March 29, 1972.

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• We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Wise, Secret, Looks

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