Enlightenment Quotes - Page 18

• One should study the Bible alongside other intellectual traditions - such as British constitutionalism, Enlightenment liberalism, and classical republicanism - in order to truly understand the American founding.

  Daniel L Dreisbach

  Order, Intellectual, Study

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• "Moksha" is really a satire of myself. I've always been interested in Eastern spirituality. I'm particularly interested in enlightenment and the spiritual pursuit to liberate ourselves (I'm a Buddhist at heart). During my teenage years, I imagined I'd end up going to India to become a yogi; study with the last living saints in a cave; give up all my worldly possessions; learn to levitate. And there's still part of me that can see myself "disappearing" for some years at an ashram somewhere.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Spiritual, Buddhist, Teenage

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I realize that I've had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Ideas, Vision, Idyllic

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• You find this watered-down enlightenment sold in mass quantity at yoga studios, high-priced shamanism retreats, DJ-fueled Ecstatic Dance parties, ayahuasca ceremonies, and self-empowerment seminars. There's a hope for a quick fix - if only we have the money and right drugs for it.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Party, Yoga, Self

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• 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.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Spiritual, Bed, Caves

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

  Murray Bookchin

  Recovery, Mean, Self

  Interview with Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. October 1979.

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• Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment.

  Nhat Hanh

  "Oprah Talks to Master Thich Nhat Hanh, the beloved buddhist Vietnamese monk: The Oprah's Exclusive Interview". Interview with Oprah Winfrey, onmogul.com.

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• Since the days of Peter the Great, Russians have been maybe Europeans who didn't share in the enlightenment and the reformation, or are they Mongol Asians with the European veneer. And they've gone back and forth.

  Brent Scowcroft

  Gone, Share, Veneer

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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• I grew up in a whaling town. We didn't stop whaling in Australia until 1978. And I've always lived in fishing communities. You could say I'm from the Redneck Wing of marine conservation. Everything I know about the sea I learnt at the end of a spear or a hook. Seems weird to admit it, but I hunted and killed my way to enlightenment. Eventually you see where you've been. All the traces you leave are gaps and absences. And it's a sick feeling, knowing you might bequeath a full dose of Nothing to those who come after you.

  Tim Winton

  Marine, Redneck, Knowing

  Source: www.sas.org.uk

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• I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Thinking, People, Target

  Source: blog.sfgate.com

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• Protecting the weak is the first step to enlightenment and being truly civilized.

  Gary Yourofsky

  Firsts, Steps, Weak

  Source: www.all-creatures.org

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• Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Opportunity, Invisible Hand, Hands

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it's a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there's nothing wrong with that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Mean, Thinking

  Source: chomsky.info

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• 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.

  N. T. Wright

  Prayer, America, Age

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• When I'm wandering around the Himalayas, most of the people that I see are Westerners from Germany, California, or the Netherlands, who are wearing sandals, Indian smocks, and are in search of enlightenment, antiquity, peace, and all the things they can't get in the west. Most of the people they meet are Nepali villagers in Lee jeans, Reeboks, and Madonna T-shirts who are looking for the paradise that they associate with Los Angeles - a paradise of material prosperity and abundance.

  Pico Iyer

  Jeans, California, People

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• Growing up, all I saw was my parents trying to be the best people they could be, and people coming to them for wisdom, coming to them for guidance, and them not putting themselves on a pedestal, but literally being face-to-face with these people and saying, "I'm no better than you, but the fact that you're coming to me to reach some sort of enlightenment or to shine a light on something, that makes me feel love and gratitude for you." They always give back what people give to them. And sometimes they keep giving and giving and giving.

  Willow Smith

  Gratitude, Growing Up, Light

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• My own experience has taught me not to underestimate the power of those who protest against cruelty. I'd also say that there may be a tendency to view the animal-rights opposition in somewhat distorted fashion as a new development, as the product of a very recent enlightenment about the rights due to animals.

  Bette Ford

  Fashion, Animal, Rights

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentinels and embodiments of Enlightenment virtues of reason, dissent, and skepticism.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Eye, Past, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Believe, Angel, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I can't compare my life growing up in Leimert Park to someone in Imperial Village Projects; we don't have the same options and I understand that. You do what you do based on survival and instincts. If I know something, I try to share it and give that opportunity and enlightenment to whomever I'm around, some people might not want to hear it but once you know something, you have the option to do better.

  Dom Kennedy

  Growing Up, Opportunity, Giving

  Source: lasentinel.net

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• I think Enlightenment as an epistemic ideal involves rejecting the appeal to a fundamental stratum of non-conceptual self-evidence.

  Ray Brassier

  Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Historically, the idea that you take something novel and you break it has been seen as the ultimate rejection of Enlightenment values, of progress, of civilization - because how could you possibly move forward if you break technology? I think that that misses the point, that if you introduce any kind of technology, what you're introducing is a new way of living and the consequences of that new way of living for people who were enmeshed in a different way of living need to be thought through.

  Sheila Jasanoff

  Moving, Thinking, Technology

  "Technological Innovation Doesn’t Have to Make Us Less HumanTechnological Innovation Doesn’t Have to Make Us Less Human". Interview With Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, www.motherjones.com. September 4, 2016.

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• The word God, to me, is like the word enlightenment. It's become so corrupted by our ideas of what God is.

  Gangaji

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I think that what we need is a balance between men and women. I don't believe in the value of the matriarchy as a model for human organizations any more than I believe in the value of patriarchy as a successful model. I think that what we need is a balance of male and female, the yin and the yang, the tantric union of god and goddess, enlightenment of the individual.

  James Wasserman

  Believe, Successful, Men

  Source: www.lotusguide.com

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• There was this famous clash of civilization thesis from Samuel Huntington, a political theorist. And the idea was that Western civilization is at war with Islam and maybe some of the other civilizations around the world. And I don't agree with that. But I do think there is such a thing as Western civilization. I think it starts with the Greeks and the Romans. Then it goes through the Enlightenment - or the Reformation, the Enlightenment. It goes through the scientific age. And it somewhat defines some of the cultures and mores of Europe and North America and some other countries.

  David Brooks

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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