c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.(unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions) 
— William Gaddis
Everybody is seeking to reach higher self but hardly anyone reaches.
— Santosh Kalwar
It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.
— Samuel Moyn
I wear a taint of rationing, that's all. I have the thready, ashamed look of a reduced person who assumes there is a worse reduction to come.
— Morag Joss
How can I know these trees, how can I know you, how can I know the other if I myself am unknown to me, if I am myself ignorant; when I do not know who I am.
— Osho, Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery
Tapascharya, spiritual practice means: accepting the truth that you are alone; that there is no way one can have a friend, a companion. No matter how much you long for it, regardless of how much you close your eyes and dream of them – you will still remain alone. For lives you built a home, you built a family, and then you lost it – and all through that you have always remained alone. Not even slightly has your aloneness been ever affected. So one who has known, one who has accepted that he is alone, for him there is an indication in this sutra: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. Only being is yours, nothing else.
— Osho, Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery
Shiva is saying: the body is a product of nature and your will to do. The nature is merely the source, the womb. Your ego functions like a seed in it. Your will to do this or that, to achieve this or that, to become this or that – acts like a seed. And the moment the art of your doing meets the womb of nature, a body is formed.Therefore, buddhas say: ”Give up all desires, only then will you be liberated.: If you desired for heaven, you will become an angel, but that won’t be liberation either. Because as long as desires persist, there can never be any liberation. All desires lead to the formation of bodies.
— Osho, Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery
The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with ever nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there - a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe. Seen for a moment, half-sensed, a flash of insight that had been gone before there had been time for it to register on her brain, sensed and known for an instant only and then gone so quickly that it had left impression only, no certain memory and no solid knowledge, but impressions only, like a face seen in a lightning flash and then the darkness closing in,
— Clifford D. Simak, A Choice of Gods
Hence there is no free admission to the process of enlightenment - it is always paid at a psycho-traumatic cost. Only such individuals as always already bring along much more injury than could be caused by mere cognitive attacks on their narcissistic system have an apparently free backstage pass to it. Such candidates, like the highly talented of a special type, obtain their degree in wound studies free of charge. For them psychical sacrifices that only affect the cognitive immunity-shield appear to be forms of relief - for which reason they move about in the region of obscure theory like fish in water.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger
Half your life is spent in thinking of the past and the other half in thinking about the future. The journey never begins. Either you roam around the byways of your memory, which is a dead dream, or you wander in your imagination which is a dream of the future, which is still to come. You are divided in these two. The present is in the middle, and that is where life is – but you miss it!
— Osho, Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery
Enlightenment is coming out from the fear mode, victim mode and guilt mode of living to the mode of empowerment.
— Amit Ray
Enlightenment is living in the light of cosmic collaboration.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
Renunciation is the art of removing the barriers between one’s self and others.
— Amit Ray, Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity
These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
— Noam Chomsky
There are many fishes in the sea and then there are the beautiful swishy mermaids. Me?! No I'm not the fish not even the mermaid, I dont belong to the sea. I am the Ocean! At a horizon far far away I'm a whirlpool of storm rising and chasing, twirling and dancing to my own tunes and at another all calm serene still and silent, I am the ocean! limitless boundless infinite and as beautiful as I may seem from the outside, I have life within!
— Himanjali Singh
The Society of Professional Journalists believes that "public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy." If that is so, can justice or democracy be secure in a media world where public enlightenment has been supplanted by the superficial?
— Larry J. Schweiger, Last Chance: Preserving Life on Earth
Once you have known awareness, nothing is worth it-- you have known the greatest bliss of life. Then, suddenly, many things simply drop; they become stupid,become foolish. The motivation is not there,the desire is not there, the dreams have fallen.
— Osho, Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance
Every piece of clutter you dissolve back into clear light allows your higher inner blueprint, your soul’s destiny, to translate fluidly and accurately into the form of your life. The clearer you become, the easier it is to evolve along with the planet—with no snags, stuckness, or suffering. This is the act of becoming transparent.
— Penney Peirce, Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity
When you see through a defense mechanism, you don’t stop at the intimidating behavior but go right on into the underlying misperception about life and through that to the path back to harmony. When you see through people’s fear-based actions, motives, and secrets, you’re really aiming for their sweet vulnerability, inner beauty, and magnificence—and you find their soul.
— Penney Peirce, Transparency: Seeing Through to Our Expanded Human Capacity
Enlightenment isn't the end but the beginning, the start of a journey that a small group of people begun while the rest sleeps.
— Robin Sacredfire
When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void. Then you can surrender; then you have surrendered. There are thousands and thousands of stories… just by a touch, just by a look, someone became enlightened. And these minor surrenders prepare you for the total surrender. Once you have known that through surrender you receive something unknown, unbelievable, unexpected, never even dreamed of, then you are ready for a major surrender. And that is the work of the master – to help you in minor surrenders so that you can gather courage for a major surrender, for a total surrender.
— Osho, The Book of Secrets
We believed in another world, but we admitted the feebleness of our senses. Then came 'enlightenment,' and made everything so very clear and enlightened, that we can see nothing for excess of light, and go banging our noses against the first tree we come to in the wood. We insist, now-a-days, on grasping the other world with stretched-out arms of flesh and bone.
— E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Serapion Brethren. Vol. I
The problem with car insurance is that you never know how bad your policy is until you are involved in a car crash. At that point enlightenment begins.
— Steven Magee
Today’s China is an artifact of an extended and contentious history while the relatively young American Republic is a daring project informed by the enlightenment philosophy espoused by the Founding Fathers.
— Patrick Mendis
I am not my mind, because I can observe my thoughts. So the observer is different from the observed – I am not my mind.” he found that there is no atman, no soul, because this atma is nothing but your mental information – just doctrines, words, philosophies.
— Osho, The Book of Secrets
When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void. Then you can surrender; then you have surrendered.
— Osho, The Book of Secrets
Knowing it, you know the very heartbeat of existence. Knowing it, you have known all that is worth knowing, and you have achieved all that is worth achieving. It opens doors to all the mysteries of existence, to all the treasures of existence which belong to you. Outside you are simply a beggar. Even your greatest intellectuals are just playing with words.
— Osho, Watch and Wait: relaxing and waking up - instinct and intuition
We seek the fire of the spark that is already within us.
— Kamand Kojouri
At some magical instant you realize a deep Harmony with the universe. Enlightenment is that harmony.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
The supreme artist lives as closely as possible to replicating the perfect dream, with life unfolding in a manner that a person could never conceive or direct.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
They were in a position of total ignorance and people in that position often died without being enlightened.
— Eoin Colfer, The Time Paradox
We can only hope to live a meaningful life by serving as earnest witnesses to life’s tragic beauty.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I say, "it seemed to me," for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their own— recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life.
— André Gide, The Immoralist
Divinity never forces itself upon you. If you are willing, it is always there for you. If you are not willing, it is not there for you. So all you need to do is create the right kind of willingness and receptivity. Just to bow down and not have a will of your own is the biggest receptivity. It is the easiest way to receive.
— Sadhguruuru, Of Mystics & Mistakes
Essentially, thought and emotion. If you make these two things unimportant, there is room for something to happen. Life is very, very simple and direct, but the mind is very complex and devious. If you do not pay any attention to it, it will settle down.
— Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudevuru
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?
— Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
The greatest challenge in life is to be our own person and accept that being different is a blessing and not a curse. A person who knows who they are lives a simple life by eliminating from their orbit anything that does not align with his or her overriding purpose and values. A person must be selective with their time and energy because both elements of life are limited.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The highest degree of human attainment comes when a person is blissfully at peace with his or her own nature and the natural world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life flows at ease whenever a person ceases complaining about the past, worrying about the future, lives in the now without resisting pain, and accepts the moral sublimity of living in a state of grace.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment.
— John Cleese, So, Anyway...
A person must always be ready to kindle the candle in their heart and fill the void in their soul by unveiling into a courageous, peaceful, and loving person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person desires to leave a mark of goodness on earth before death arrives. All artists are creators in the face of death. All of life a person seeks to salvage something worthwhile and enduring from living a tragic life. We must eventually dance with death. A person begins on a road leading to personal enlightenment by giving up false beliefs, quelling destructive desires, overcoming fearfulness, and by seeking truth. In order to lead an evocative life full of truth, I must stop living a false life, conquer my fearfulness, and begin expressing love, wonder, and gratitude for all the beauty and splendor of the world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster
Enlightenment is something that you've been resisting to happen. It’s not something you have to struggle to make happen. The key is not to get in the way! Just allow it occur.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
I have spent much of my adult life trying to figure out how to experience holiness, and now I know that the struggle to figure things out is antithetical to the experience. You simply relax into holiness the way you would a warm bath.
— Victor Shamas, The Chanters Guide: Sacred Chanting as a Shamanic Practice
We are all like cells within the body of the Universe/ God—as are plants, animals, air, natural resources and everything down to a subatomic level.
— Russell Anthony Gibbs, The Six Principles of Enlightenment and Meaning of Life
The ego is the seeker but does not want the Truth.
— Maria Erving
Spiritual awakening is not really spiritual at all.
— Maria Erving
In a world of limitations, only a fool would hesitate to touch the infinite.
— Rhoads Brazos, Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis
If the conscious falls into the unconscious you fall into a coma, and if the unconscious falls into the conscious and becomes conscious itself, you become enlightened, you become a Buddha, a Sosan.
— Osho, Hsin Hsin Ming, the Book of Nothing: Discourses on the Faith Mind of Sosan
Unique individuals with unique ideas are the ones who are going to shift the world to a new enlightenment.
— Luis Enrique Cavazos, The Five Virtues That Awaken Your Life
What matters is the act of surrender. The awakening process all boils down to this: surrender. How, you may ask?Like this: Lay yourself down on the floor and let go of everything.Let go of the need to understand, the need to know how exactly to do it and what to say, how to be and so on.Just "give up" (the struggle).Literally just lay there and say "Take me, I'm yours. Do with me what you wish, I won't resist or avoid anything anymore. I'm sincerely yours".Let go. Surrender. Just let go.You don't have to figure anything out, you don't have to seek anymore, you don't have to look for any answers or solutions anymore.Just let go. Let everything go.I'm telling you; this is the ultimate solution and answer that the awakening process leads to anyway, so you might as well save yourself years of suffering by surrendering to Truth right now and let it take over your life.It all falls into place in the moment of surrender, that's when freedom and peace comes and takes over your whole being.
— Maria Erving
Serenity of mind produces an expanding awareness that fosters creative selflessness, which in turn enables us to experience unabashed harmony communing in rhythmical bliss with nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The background of samsara is bliss
— Bert McCoy
Truth is non-negotiable and its promise is love.
— Maria Erving
Strength in peace. Strength in love. Always.
— Janice  Anderson
Do you use 'True Will' as an excuse to do nothing?Have you declared yourself enlightened?Damn your weak philosophies
—  a pox and a pestilence your despicable sloth and arrogance.
I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.
— Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment
The path of Tao is not that of sudden enlightenment. It is not like Zen. Zen is sudden enlightenment, Tao is gradual growth.
— Osho, The Secret of Secrets
A buddha lives in the orgasmic state for twenty-four hours, day in and day out. Between the day Gautama Buddha became enlightened and the day he died there is a distance of forty-two years. For these forty-two years he was utterly in an orgasmic state. Just think! Those few moments you have are nothing compared to a Buddha’s.
— Osho, The Secret of Secrets
If one comes to fundamentals then this is the most fundamental thing: the moment you are not, enlightenment is. With emptiness, the matter is settled.
— Osho, The Secret of Secrets
The capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all education, enlightenment and human progress consists.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
— Adyashanti
Enlightenment is recognizing that we are all connected, then consciously living that realization—our thoughts, words, and actions an unshakable reflection of that understanding.
— Laurie Buchanan, PhD
However it might go, I should have no regrets. If I should be reduced to begging in the street, then I should enjoy the feel of pavement beneath my feet and the odors of asphalt and automobile exhausts. Good and bad fortune were equally attractive when viewed in such a context. Hunger was as interesting as satiety. A life without sight was as interesting as life with sight. Who was to say different? Society? The bulk of humanity?They were living their first lives, cautiously aware that someday they would die. They had everything to lose. They could not take the risks. But I had been through death, had my insides burned out by it twice.I was living a second life, freed of those cautious awarenesses.I had nothing to lose. I could take all the risks.
— John Howard Griffin, Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
no matter how long you live, no matter how mature or philosophical you may grow to be, almost all sudden enlightenment will feel precisely this way, like a boot in the stomach, like acid on your tongue, and the sooner you accept this the better off you’ll be.
— Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!
... But these skeptics are only selectively skeptical. They think themselves enlightened for resisting all this new proof and remaining steadfast in mistrusting anything that someone else says. But it is a false enlightenment to accept only those ideas that align with one's worldview and reject those that don't.
— Ken Ilgunas, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland
Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
— Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss; To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and shipwrecked ones!By diverse ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness. And unwillingly only did I ask my way - that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves. A testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling: and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however - is my taste: Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy."This is now my way - where is yours?" Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way." For "the way" - it doth not exist!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. . . Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves rebelling against the sovereign of the earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is n
— Maximilien de Robespierre, Robespierre
In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him.
— Thomas Merton
There is no point of being enlightened unless you have started enlightening others!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
And as for the enlightened, one can only pity them the deceptions of their muses.
— Alex Stein, Weird Emptiness: Essays and Aphorisms
Detachment is a basic requirement for seeking enlightenment. Anyone or anything we are attached to has power to manipulate us although we all have freedom to choose.
— Hina Hashmi, Your Life A Practical Guide to Happiness Peace and Fulfilment
You’ll get lost and then you’ll find it.
— Mark Darrah, A Catalogue of Common People
Now Siddhartha also got some idea of why he had fought this self in vain as a Brahman, as a penitent. Too much knowledge had held him back, too many holy verses, too many sacrificial rules, to much self-castigation, so much doing and striving for that goal! Full of arrogance, he had been, always the smartest, always working the most, always one step ahead of all others, always the knowing and spiritual one, always the priest or wise one. Into being a priest, into this arrogance, into this spirituality, his self had retreated, there it sat firmly and grew, while he thought he would kill it by fasting and penance. Now he saw it and saw that the secret voice had been right, that no teacher would ever have been able to bring about his salvation. Therefore, he had to go out into the world, lose himself to lust and power, to woman and money, had to become a merchant, a dice-gambler, a drinker, and a greedy person, until the priest and Samana in him was dead. Therefore, he had to continue bearing these ugly years, bearing the disgust, the teachings, the pointlessness of a dreary and wasted life up to the end, up to bitter despair, until Siddhartha the lustful, Siddhartha the greedy could also die. He had died, a new Siddhartha had woken up from the sleep. He would also grow old, he would also eventually have to die, mortal was Siddhartha, mortal was every physical form. But today he was young, was a child, the new Siddhartha, and was full of joy.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
It's always best to feel fulfilled first, before finding a man. Then you'll know the value of yourself, and you'll hold the key to your own happiness. So you won't turn into a vulnerable, needy, emotional mess the minute you fall in love.
— Menna van Praag, Men, Money and Chocolate: What more could there be to life?
Love everybody and tell the truth.
— Maharajji
If Enlightenment was the salad, Entanglement is the soup
— Neri Oxman
And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?
— Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time
The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else – EVERYTHING else – is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole. Of course, to someone who’s just going about their normal human existence undistracted by the larger questions, that rubbish and debris is everything that makes them who they are. But to someone who wants to get to the truth, who they are is what’s in the way. All fear is ultimately fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of that hole is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about the breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole.
— Jed McKenna
Who do you love more, your thoughts or God?
— Bert McCoy
Enlightenment is when a laptop comes to know that it is a laptop.
— Girish Kohli
She shook her head. "It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana." "What's wrong with that?" "Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof—that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work." "This is better," Will insisted. "You mean, it's more delicious. That's why it's such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You've just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him." A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding. "Supermango to fruit of knowledge — I'm going to wean you," she said, "by easy stages.
— Aldous Huxley
The main point of enlightenment is man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.
— Immanuel Kant
And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining characteristic of the species might be lapse.
— Erika Johansen, The Invasion of the Tearling
Murky Water, Dusty MirrorMurky water is turbid; let it settle and it clears. A dusty mirror is dim; clean it and it is bright.What I realize as I observe this is the Tao of clarifying the mind and perceiving its essence.The reason why people's minds are not clear and their natures are not stable is that they are full of craving and emotion. Add to this eons of mental habit, acquired influences deluding the mind, their outgrowths clogging up the opening of awareness - this is like water being murky, like a mirror being dusty. The original true mind and true essence are totally lost. The feelings and senses are unruly, subject to all kinds of influences, taking in all sorts of things, defiling the mind.If one can suddenly realize this and change directions, wash away pollution and contamination, gradually remove a lifetime of biased mental habits, wandering thoughts and perverse actions, increasing in strength with persistence, refining away the dross until there is nothing more to be refined away, when the slag is gone the gold is pure. The original mind and fundamental essence will spontaneously appear in full, the light of wisdom will suddenly arise, and one will clearly see the universe as though it were in the palm of the hand, with no obstruction.This is like murky water returning to clarity when settled, like a dusty mirror being restored to brightness when polished. That which is fundamental is as ever: without any lack.
— Liu Yiming, Awakening to the Tao
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.
— C.G. Jung, Answer to Job
The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.
— Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Stupidity and MadnessThe Tao is clear, yet this clarity requires you to sweep away all your clutter. At all times watch out for your own stupidity, be careful of how your mind jumps around. When nothing occurs to involve your mind, you return to true awareness. When unified mindfulness is purely real, you comprehend the great restoration. The ridiculous ones are those who try to cultivate quietude - as long as body and mind are unstable, it is madness to go into the mountains.
— Liu Yiming, Awakening to the Tao
Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if . . . priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.
— Napoléon Bonaparte, Correspondance générale
Does one really have to fretAbout enlightenment?No matter what road I travel,I’m going home.
— Shinsho
When one has attained a state of mind from which the evil passions of the present world have been so utterly winnowed, fear too is forgotten. Thus it was that the priest no longer could understand why Hell should exist.
— Yukio Mishima
We're shadows! of naught - living, dying! for what's not.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
Cut off entanglements.Get rid of anger and hatred.Do not be afraid of hard work.Tolerate ignominy and endure dishonor.Forgive people and defer to others.Take possessions lightly; take life seriously.View others and self as the same.Do whatever you can to be helpful.Practice developing virtue is the greatest priority; when achievement is great and practice profound, it moves heaven and earth.Ridiculous are the foolish ones who only profit themselves; with no achievement and little action, they dream of becoming immortals.
— Liu Yiming
Forms come and go. You, the quantum non-entity behind your human identity, comes nor goes.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?
— Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World
I never realized it was all a game,until I started winning.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it...
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
I became aware that there was no barrier between what was inside and what was outside. My body was illuminated by a bright light. I heard with my eyes and saw with my ears. I used my nose as mouth and my mouth as nose. I experienced the world with the totality of my senses as my spirit gathered and my form dissolved. There was no distinction between muscles and bones. My body stopped being heavy and I felt like a floating leaf. Without knowing it, I was being carried by the wind. Drifting here and there, I did not know whether I rode on the wind or the wind rode on me.
— Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living
Progressive. n. One who is unable to distinguish between novelty and enlightenment.
— Ron Brackin
I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.(Mercer)
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A man like this will not go where he has no will to go, will not do what he has no mind to do. Though the world might praise him and say he had really found something, he would look unconcerned and never turn his head; though the world might condemn him and say he had lost something, he would look serene and pay no heed. The praise and blame of the world are no loss or gain to him.
— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Relationships without a Divine Aim always "break up," for they are based on nothing. Divine Purpose could be described as forgiveness -- the undoing and releasing of the ego. Belief in the ego prevents awareness of True Union and Intimacy. The underlying fear of Intimacy and Union is the ego's fear of loss of itself, the 'personal self' and the 'personal world.
— David Hoffmeister, Unwind Your Mind Back to God:  Experiencing A Course in Miracles
Only love can be shared, and the attempt to 'share' an illusion is literally impossible.
— David Hoffmeister, Unwind Your Mind Back to God:  Experiencing A Course in Miracles
For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature."A gift of life," I responded, "if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love them.""Do you believe love is the strongest emotion?" he asked."Do you know any stronger?""Yes, interest.""By which you probably mean a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, is that it?""Let's agree on that definition!" he said with a laugh. "Good night!"We had arrived again at the Leverkühn house, and he opened his front door.
— Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
When a man has many women in his life to cater to, one of them is bound to come last.
— Terry A. O'Neal
As the wine matures in the wine bottle so doth the minds of men and woman through experience
— Bradley Elis
The mind that is deceived believes that this world is real. It believes that it is a real person and that there are real events that are happening to it. I really lost my job; I really do not have enough money to pay the rent. That is how it feels. It really does not see it as a dream. When we go to bed at night and dream, do we react to the dreams? There is running and sometimes fear and lots of emotions that seem to go on in those dreams. Why? Because the mind thinks it is in the dream. If you really let go of judgment you will start to see more and more that you are the dreamer of the dream, you are the cause of the dream. If I am in the dream it does not seem like I am the cause of the dream and I am not in control of it, but if I step back and realize that I am the dreamer of the dream, then I can accept another purpose for it. OK, I am going to change the purpose – out with the ego and in with the Holy Spirit! The Course calls that the happy dream. There is nothing on the screen that has changed, there are still the same things going on, what the world describes as wars and so on but my purpose for the world has changed.
— David Hoffmeister, Unwind Your Mind Back to God:  Experiencing A Course in Miracles
No spiritual master who ever walked the earth has anything on you. You're the complete package, the real deal. You just don't remember it yet.
— Carrie Triffet, The Enlightenment Project
So pervasively has Enlightenment culture’s anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.
— Craig S. Keener, Gift & Giver: The Holy Spirit for Today
We effect more than we can possibly know. With every mood, every thought, every word, every gesture, we change our lives and our universe.
— Maharishi Sadasiva Isham
May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are alllost, and still we are guided—by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way—the hero’s journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here.
— Elizabeth Lesser
Knowledge is the first step of enlightenment
— Charles T. Faulkner
And also, to encompass the madness within, let us reach forth our minds.
— Rae La Rae
Dare to learn.Dare to relearn.Dare to outlearn.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.
— Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature
Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.
— Emanuel Swedenborg
I’ve heard that sometimes a version of you must die before another more enlightened version can be born. I think that’s true after watching the corpse of myself walk around.
— Julie Flygare, Wide Awake and Dreaming: A Memoir
Education provide enlightenment for one's life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When the human condition is finally demystified, human insecurity and nervousness will be at a maximum…for this ultimate enlightenment to be allowed, society is going to have to adhere scrupulously to the democratic principle of freedom of expression.
— Jeremy Griffith, Is It To Be: Terminal Alienation or Transformation For The Human Race
You have eternity to experience your awakened self. So why not enjoy the dream while you’re in it, even if it is limited?
— Teresa Tsalaky, The Transition Witness
Knowledge is a priceless gift of enlightenment
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Education is provide enlightenment for one's life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There is an enlightened way to flow with, in, and through conflict.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The unseen essential awaits your enlightened heart's ascension to love.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
If a man wanted to put the entire universe in his breast, he couldn't do it with his chest stuck out.
— Eiji Yoshikawa, Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan
Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun. Nirvana is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering.When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun. The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again.
— Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State
The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.
— Jill Lepore
God’s love supersedes all religions and it is the core of all religions.
— Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, The Religion of God
Enlightenment doesn’t make us a better person if we seek it just for us. It doesn’t erase our desires or put an end to even our own suffering. In fact it is the suffering that ennobles us.
— Balroop Singh
I am seeking spiritual awaken and enlightenment from the Creator.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You will not die if you abandon them. You will not lose if you abandon them. You will gain something greater. If you do not abandon them you will never reach enlightenment, nor find your self that is at peace.
— Woo Myung, Nature's Flow
All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
— Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State
If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves.
— E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann
But I wish to be enlightened.''Let me caution you against it.''Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?''Yes, indeed.'She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement.
— Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower
It is the same principle as washing dirty clothes - the more you clean the dirt away, the more it goes back to its original state. A piece of paper, which has been scribbled on, gets cleaner the more the scribbling is erased. Enlightenment is the same as knowing the true state of the paper once it is clean.
— Woo Myung, Stop Living In This Land, Go To The Everlasting World Of Happiness, Live There Forever
[To think for oneself] is the maxim of a reason never passive. The tendency to such passivity, and therefore to heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest prejudice of all is to represent nature as not subject to the rules that the understanding places at its basis by means of its own essential law, i.e. is superstition. Deliverance from superstition is called enlightenment; because although this name belongs to deliverance from prejudices in general, yet superstition especially (in sensu eminenti) deserves to be called a prejudice. For the blindness in which superstition places us, which it even imposes on us as an obligation, makes the need of being guided by others, and the consequent passive state of our reason, peculiarly noticeable.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal.
— Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology
There is a great difference between enlightenment and education. The former is a discerned vital knowledge without guidance while the latter is imparting any knowledge.
— Uzoma Nnadi
When humanity finally emerges from the Middle Ages altogether, when he stops connecting psychic behavior with"the work of the Devil" or with some unknown, unmentionable force, then he will emerge into the New Age of enlightenment.
— Daniel Logan