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e30e828 You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone. advaita advaita-vedanta eternal-truths everyone-belongs vedanta enlightenment loneliness global-oneness unity spirituality motivational life-lessons life wisdom inspirational non-duality insights interconnectedness awakening eternal oneness aloneness everyone spiritual-quotes spiritual-growth nonduality eternal-life wisdom-quotes alone awareness Amit Ray
4efd0ca Jessica. For god's sake," he said. "Allow me to do at least one common courtesy for you. In spite ow what 'women's lib' teaches you, chivalry does not imply that women are powerless. On the contrary, chivalry is an admission of women's superiority. An acknowledgment o enlightenment true love inspirational Beth Fantaskey
42f3830 Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world. enlightenment spiritual inspirational awakening giving wisdom-quotes service awareness self-realization know-thyself Ramana Maharshi
1aeba29 The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines. enlightenment humor inspirational road difficulties Anne Lamott
e4c8d31 Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much; Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule-- Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! mankind enlightenment poetry humanity reason error fallibility humility Alexander Pope
b7409f2 When the telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's , I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship--though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved... enlightenment irony literature hate stupidity religion friendship humor love bastille demagogy fatwa first-amendment satanic-verses washington-post united-states-constitution george-hw-bush iran khomeini theocracy intimidation dictatorship united-states rushdie individualism fascism principles bullying free-speech censorship Christopher Hitchens
91aaf68 Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. enlightenment wealth education treasures heritage knowledge Henry David Thoreau
e2339b9 An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. enlightenment hermann-hesse duty Hermann Hesse
eb18d70 If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective. We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe. Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day--the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening? It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we're miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn't seasoned just the way we like. When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we're up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first. In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter. enlightenment mark-nepo joy happiness perspective misery Mark Nepo
e721cde To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life. enlightenment philosophy rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau
c9df7d0 Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone enlightenment narcissism self-absorption meditation self-realization self-improvement Nassim Nicholas Taleb
e791161 Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. enlightenment children despair Hermann Hesse
c98c0d7 As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name--the --for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher .) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them to think also. enlightenment christianity religion education life assimilation chabad-messianism dialectics haskalah isaiah-berlin menachem-mendel-schneerson messianism moses-mendelssohn prohibitions rebbes rituals rabbis exile monotheism judaism old-testament germans free-thought return study ethics plagiarism prophecy atheism voltaire islam intellect antisemitism thought evil Christopher Hitchens
a0744b7 Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now. enlightenment heaven kindness meaning living-outside-yourself fulfillment salvation purpose Jack Kerouac
11fab54 "It's ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing." - Snipes (185)" enlightenment science philosophy sight ignorance Ron Rash
89877dc "It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us." - Tilopa" enlightenment dukkha four-noble-truths samsara suffering Lama Surya Das
b74df39 Yes, he could walk forever. He could so easily continue to walk and all thoughts of death would fall away, absorbed by the silent snow. [...] And then he heard it, very faintly at first, but distinct just the same. He heard the snow falling gently through the air, each flake sounded distinctly different, yet just as each fell unhindered by another, so their sound did not clash or interfere with each other, but blended into a snow song that he knew very few had ever heard. And that song became louder, though always gentle, as he continued to be absorbed by the light, to become one with the light... and now there weren't any feet to leave prints, or a body or eyes to glow, but just light and sound and pure joy, pure eternal joy. No past, no future, no, not even a present, just ever new joy where there wasn't even a memory of pain or struggle or sorrow... just ever new joy... enlightenment joy timelessness Hubert Selby Jr.
1e345c8 "The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae (the son of the Sun and Moon) is the possible result as well as the symbol of this union of opposites. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. "It has a thousand names," say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal toward which it aims is nameless, ineffable." enlightenment religion coniunctio-oppositorum the-meaning-of-life individuation psychoanalysis christ C.G. Jung
31a37e9 Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings. enlightenment Barbara Ehrenreich
09b55f9 Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget. enlightenment travel learning landscape meditation Barry Lopez
65be97a A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough. enlightenment spirituality spiritual 70-s acid tripping psychedelics lsd growth Tom Wolfe
c07bec7 "Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy." lover madness enlightenment illusion imagination love craving platohtenment divinity divine Thomas Moore
4147265 Do little things every day that no one else seems to want to do, be patient, and success will find you. enlightenment writing success life wisdom elizabeth-gilbert Brandi L. Bates
7925348 It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha) enlightenment experience Hermann Hesse
9089908 How odd that we spend so much time treating the darkness, and so little time seeking the light. The ego loves to glorify itself by self-analysis, yet we do not get rid of darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat. We only get rid of darkness by turning on the light. enlightenment suffering light depression self-awareness psychoanalysis darkness-and-light darkness-within light-of-love light-of-the-spirit painful-memories self-analysis treatment healing-the-past spiritual-healing spiritual-wisdom grief-and-loss therapy ego self-help Marianne Williamson
0d2ece0 Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between. enlightenment progress irony lies socialism literature humanism politics faith religion science truth apoliticism berlin bought-priesthood cape-coloureds eurocentricism george-hw-bush german-people groupthink left-wing-politics margaret-thatcher munich personality-politics polytheism potus radical-politics tribalism xhosa-people zulu-people ronald-reagan sectarianism monotheism solipsism argument critical-thinking self-pity self-love south-africa totalitarianism journalism right-wing-politics george-orwell soviet-union united-states conviction orthodoxy los-angeles film individualism atheism hedonism thomas-mann populism russia communism postmodernism cold-war germany literary-criticism euphemism Christopher Hitchens
b79ee3f I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind. If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all. Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile. In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out. enlightenment philosophy high-country montana mountains wild meditation reflection consciousness awareness thought introspection Robert M. Pirsig
56fad68 And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with? enlightenment Jeanette Winterson
5bcb784 "[Men] prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth [to the enlightenment of their souls]. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth." "No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it." "And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?" Here she laughs. "You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing." mankind understanding virtue enlightenment fear philosophy truth soul Iain Pears
01785f1 Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as 'enlightenment. enlightenment David Brin
a7ca6a0 Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi. enlightenment india travel varanasi Tahir Shah
2fa0c8c As in the days of the first Merovingian, who pledged allegiance to the cross because of a victorious battle, today's children of the banalized Enlightenment are likewise meant to burn what they worshipped and worship what they burned. enlightenment Peter Sloterdijk
31adbc9 "Pico Iyer: "And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around--you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps." enlightenment travel nature spirit humanity faith beauty wisdom inner-landscape mindfulness peace mystery introspection Krista Tippett
f85103b "There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on Earth." Eddie looked confused. "People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless. "This is the greatest gift God can give you: To understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for." enlightenment death god life wisdom explanation meaning-of-life peace knowledge power life-after-death Mitch Albom
35e0dcb A spiritual reinterpretation of events gives us miraculous authority to command the winds, to part the waters, and to break all chains that bind us. enlightenment magic spirituality empowerment breaking-free spiritual-growth chains healing-past-wounds healing-the-past miracle-mindset miraculous personal-power reinventing-yourself spiritual-healing spiritual-power spiritual-rebirth spiritual-reinterpretation spiritual-strength power-of-love spiritual-wisdom inner-strength miracles self-empowerment Marianne Williamson
cb2c385 They were in a position of total ignorance and people in that position often died without being enlightened. enlightenment knowledge-is-power eoin-colfer Eoin Colfer
d6d4a75 Creativity is the result of renunciation on the journey of spiritual enlightenment, not of a thirst for glory or personal pride. enlightenment spirituality life renunciation glory pride creativity Ray Mancini
db125d8 The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education. universe enlightenment Barbara Ehrenreich
f6d729a What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. enlightenment philosophy chautauqua american-history entertainment consciousness awareness media Robert M. Pirsig
d92c024 Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth. enlightenment christianity reason truth rational total-depravity sin James K.A. Smith
922cff1 The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that. enlightenment spirit humanity wonder beauty religion god life love wisdom on-being awe attention life-force mindfulness grace diversity mystery Krista Tippett
c28af66 The Enlightenment, finally, invented progressive 'history' as an inner-worldly purgatory in order to develop the conditions of possibility of a perfected 'society'. This provided the required setting for the aggressive social theology of the Modern Age to drive out the political theology of the imperial eras. What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering - mathein pathein - into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things? enlightenment philosophy theology enlightenment-quotes optimization political-theology purgatory Peter Sloterdijk
399722f Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis. enlightenment philosophy rennaisance Peter Sloterdijk
6f84f5e "Soul work [is] [...] seeking to realize (make "real") Who You Truly Are. You can create Who You Are over and over again. Indeed, you do - every day. As things now stand, you do not always come up with the same answer, however. Given an identical outer experience, on day one you may choose to be patient, loving and kind in relationship to it. On day two you may choose to be angry, ugly and sad. The Master is one who always comes up with the same answer - and that answer is always the highest choice. In this the Master is imminently predictable. Conversely, the student is completely unpredictable. One can tell how one is doing on the road to mastery by simply noticing how predictably one makes the highest choice in responding or reacting to any situation." enlightenment purposeful-living soul-work who-you-really-are journey-of-life purpose-of-life meaning-of-life self-discovery purpose Neale Donald Walsch
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