Top 120 Enlightenment Quotes

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter – which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking ‘enlightenment’ meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.

Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.

It’s wrong to look at what we call ‘Enlightenment values’ as some fad of the 18th century. It’s deeply rooted in ancient history.

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.

And as long as you‘re subject to birth and death, you’ll never attain enlightenment.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.

Amputechture’ is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

Evil is an attack against human spiritual development and enlightenment. All evil, badness, neurosis – it has one motive and one motive only, which is to destroy – to destroy your chance of arising above yourself.

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.

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.

In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter – which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking ‘enlightenment’ meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.

It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.

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.

When the entire population of the world attains enlightenment, I’ll retire and play golf every day.

What fun is life if it’s taken so seriously, and what fun is yoga and the search for enlightenment if we are tight, tense, and clenched up from the inside out?

I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that’s been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.

Enlightenment must come little by little – otherwise it would overwhelm.

We live in the age of entitlement, as opposed to enlightenment.

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.

Ask me not, ‘Are you rightwing,’ but ask me ‘Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?’ Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the ‘Wealth of Nations‘ and the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments,’ then I’m rightwing.

When the entire population of the world attains enlightenment, I’ll retire and play golf every day.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

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.

Bodhisattva is enlightened in the Buddhist philosophy, religion, tradition. He’s enlightened. It’s fine – I don’t really fight it – but many people use the term ‘zen‘ and terms like ‘nirvana,’ ‘enlightenment’ in an almost superficial way. It’s not that complicated.

If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

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

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

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

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.

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.

Europe and the world are waiting for us to defend the spirit of Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.

Bodhisattva is enlightened in the Buddhist philosophy, religion, tradition. He’s enlightened. It’s fine – I don’t really fight it – but many people use the term ‘zen‘ and terms like ‘nirvana,’ ‘enlightenment’ in an almost superficial way. It’s not that complicated.

Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.

Through reading the scriptures, we can gain the assurance of the Spirit that that which we read has come of God for the enlightenment, blessing, and joy of his children.

Three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the coffee house became the center of innovation.

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.

Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution.

It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.

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.

Christianity and Judaism have gone through the process of enlightenment, making them creative and constructive elements in society.

We who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.

I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.

When I was a kid growing up in the ’60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it’s just like a big business.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Movies can be instruments of enlightenment.

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.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

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.

I’m very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America’s naive faith that it had reinvented politics.

The theater is the place where people create ideas and send messages out, and you learn, and I think it’s a fair venue for disagreement and enlightenment.

Many spiritual teachers – in Buddhism, in Islam – have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

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.

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.

Hip-hop is my vehicle for scientific enlightenment. It wasn’t until my music career matured where I was exposed to science as an intellectual pursuit.

By 1892, enlightenment had progressed to the point where the Salem trials were simply an embarrassing blot on the history of New England. They were a part of the past that was best forgotten: a reminder of how far the human race had come in two centuries.

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.

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.

The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

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.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It’s reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness, more human enlightenment than from any other way.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let’s not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

It is at best insufficient and at worst inaccurate to settle on a definition of the Enlightenment, for the obvious reason that there was not just one.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

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

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.’

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.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value.

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment’s greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.

We’re in an age of enlightenment, and we have a choice as a society which path to take.

The left has come to regard common sense – the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community – as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

I momentarily but genuinely believed that Barack Obama was the answer not only to our nation’s depressing politics but to the question of our racial enlightenment.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

Contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment shouldn’t overgeneralize: the Enlightenment, however it is defined, is not an unalloyed good.

Borrowing knowledge of reality from all sources, taking the best from every study, Science of Mind brings together the highest enlightenment of the ages.

My music is not just about entertainment. It is about enlightenment also.

The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don’t quite manage to live up to them.

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.

The Enlightenment diamond-shaped society, with a huge, prosperous, socially-mobile, empowered middle class, is by far the most productive and creative system the world has ever seen.

Europe and the world are waiting for us to defend the spirit of Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

Borrowing knowledge of reality from all sources, taking the best from every study, Science of Mind brings together the highest enlightenment of the ages.

If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own 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.

People can hate on you for doing what it is that makes you happy, but ultimately, it has to belong to you. 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.

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

Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.

Amputechture’ is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

I love the way Monteverdi’s opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.

The ongoing argument over whether the Enlightenment is a good thing is hardly a new facet of American political life.

Ultimately, you have to work for your own enlightenment – for smarts – or it gets boring.

I love the way Monteverdi’s opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.

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.

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.

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

To me, the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

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.