Enlightenment quotes

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◆ It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

- Ken Kesey100

◆ HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.

- Chuck Palahniuk99

◆ I've learned .... That opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss.

- Andy Rooney99

◆ But to unite in a permanent religious institution which is not to be subject to doubt before the public even in the lifetime of one man, and thereby to make a period of time fruitless in the progress of mankind toward improvement, thus working to the disadvantage of posterity - that is absolutely forbidden. For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind.

- Immanuel Kant99

◆ How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

- Plato99

◆ The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching.

- Joseph Smith Jr.99

◆ For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.

- Cynthia Occelli99

◆ Do not look for happiness outside yourself. The awakened seek happiness inside.

- Peter Deunov99

◆ There is strong shadow where there is much light.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe99

◆ It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

- Henry David Thoreau99

◆ When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, 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…

- Christopher Hitchens99

◆ They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

- Joseph Conrad99

◆ My spirit is healthy, yes. But I tell you, my flesh is healthy too. I am enlightened and free, but I am also lustful and carnal.

- C. JoyBell C.99

◆ Always try and be a better person than you were yesterday, cause we aren't guaranteed tomorrow.

- Tina A. Morgan99

◆ Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.

- Bodhidharma99