Enlightenment Quotes - Page 12

• In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

  Susan Neiman

  Plato, Effort, Belief

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• Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Spiritual, Worship You, Distinction

  "Truth is a pathless land". Jiddu Krishnamurti's specch at the opening day of the annual Star Camp at Ommen, Holland, www.jkrishnamurti.org. August 3, 1929.

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• There is this unbounded, infinite, eternal, level, ocean, within every human being. Inner happiness comes with consciousness, bliss, intelligence comes with it. Creativity, love.
  Human beings have a potential and it has names like enlightenment or fulfilment, or liberation.
  True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.
  They say beauty is only skin deep but it's this stuff coming from the inside, absolute vibrant consciousness, absolute bliss

  David Lynch

  Lying, Ocean, Creativity

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• 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

  Spiritual, Growth, Foundation

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• 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.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Rights, Race, Law

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Liberalism: The Classical Tradition: The Economist”, p.14, VM eBooks

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• When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.

  Idries Shah

  Prayer, Mean, Emotional

  Idries Shah (1991). “Seeker After Truth”, p.22, Octagon Press Ltd

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• Enlightenment says the world is nothing Nothing but a dream, everything's an illusion And nothing is real.

  Van Morrison

  Dream, Real, World

  Song: Enlightenment, Album: Enlightenment

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• Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it's been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it's voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big - and takes on that damned capital C - they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.)
  Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths.

  David Gerrold

  Sacrifice, Past, Self

  "The Man Who Folded Himself". Book by David Gerrold, 1973.

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• Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pay, Elegance, Glad

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.87, Penguin

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• What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not die, or want to die. That, too, was mine; and it also is to the good. For that experience resolved proportions and relationships for me as nothing else could have done; and it is surprising, approaching the final enlightenment, how little one really has to know or feel sure about.

  Richard E. Byrd

  Men, Dying, Finals

  Richard E. Byrd (2003). “Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure”, p.8, Island Press

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• The role of the artist is like that of an explorer and a teacher - a teacher of seeing. No one is more capable of conveying this enlightenment than the artist.

  Ken Danby

  Teacher, Teaching, Artist

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• 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

  Keys, Self, Common

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.167, Simon and Schuster

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• The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie.

  Paul Tillich

  Bridges, Atmosphere, Bourgeoisie

  "The Courage to Be" by Paul Tillich, (p. 116), 1952.

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• The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.

  Clive Barker

  Age, Desire, World

  Clive Barker (2001). “The Inhuman Condition”, p.164, Simon and Schuster

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• As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Dharma-nature by birth. If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all ages - undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment - find it necessary to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practice?

  Dogen

  Spiritual, School, Buddhism

  "Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist". Book by Hee-jin Kim, 2004.

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• 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

  Struggle, Perception, Would Be

  "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.

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• Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Numbers, Doe, Illusion

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.7, Verso

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• I am who I am who I am who am I Requesting some enlightenment Could I have been anyone other than me?

  Dave Matthews

  Who I Am, I Am Who I Am, Has Beens

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• 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

  Book, Parent, Mountain

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.50, Vintage

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• If we really prefer basic sanity or enlightenment, it's irritatingly possible to get into it.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Sanity, Ifs

  Chogyam Trungpa (2008). “Ocean of Dharma: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa”, p.304, Shambhala Publications

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Order, Law, Secret

  Kenneth Rexroth (1968). “Classics Revisited”, p.132, New Directions Publishing

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• What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.

  Richard Condon

  Art, Thinking, Literature

  1976 Comment in D L Fitzpatrick (ed) Contemporary Novelists.

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• We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.

  Murray Rothbard

  Opposites, Groups, Doctrine

  "Are Libertarians 'Anarchists'?". Faith and Freedom, unpublished, mid-1950s.

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• What, concretely, is Enlightenment ?" "Seeing Reality as it is," said the Master. "Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?" "Oh, no! Most people see it as they think it is." "What's the difference?" "The difference between thinking you are drowning in a stormy sea and knowing you cannot drown because there isn't any water in sight for miles around.

  Anthony de Mello

  Reality, Thinking, Sight

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