1.
Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.
William Blake
Acceptance of accountability for one's life.
2.
You are asking yourself, as all of us must: 'Who am I?' . . . 'Where am I?' . . . 'Whence do I go?' The process of enlightenment is usually slow. But, in the end, our seeking always brings a finding. These great mysteries are, after all, enshrined in complete simplicity.
Bill W.
3.
I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, 'Is there enlightenment?' but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal of enlightenment exists, I have had to search. It is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.
U.G. Krishnamurti
4.
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 pretence. It's the
complete eradication of everything we
imagined to be true.
Adyashanti
5.
In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
6.
Enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.
Milton H. Erickson
Realization is always preceded by bewilderment.
7.
The greatest obstacle to enlightenment is getting past your delusion that you are not already enlightened.
Ramana Maharshi
The greatest impediment to illumination is surpassing your misconception that you have not already attained insight.
8.
Even in the world, the yogi who faithfully discharges his responsibilities, without personal motive or attachment, treads the sure path of enlightenment.
Mahavatar Babaji
9.
Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.
Matsuo Basho
10.
Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.
Nikola Tesla
11.
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
Anne Lamott
12.
Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is to shed the body-mind of oneself, and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.
Dogen
13.
Meditation is not a way to enlightenment, Nor is it a method of achieving anything at all. It is peace itself. It is the actualization of wisdom, The ultimate truth of the oneness of all things.
Dogen
14.
You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.
Paddy Chayefsky
15.
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.
Morihei Ueshiba
16.
If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.
D.T. Suzuki
17.
We practice to learn how to let go, not how to increase our holding on to things. Enlightenment appears when you stop wanting anything.
Ajahn Chah
18.
If you see the illusion you are enlightened, but if you think that you are enlightened you are in the illusion!
H. W. L. Poonja
20.
Create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path
Rajneesh
21.
Be humble in order to attain enlightenment. Thus, after attaining it, be more humble still.
Samael Aun Weor
22.
Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.
Idries Shah
23.
We live in an age that's repeating itself endlessly. We're getting closer again to the techno-chic world we saw in Atlantis that occurs in countless planes. It's indigenous to enlightenment.
Frederick Lenz
24.
The high-priests and priestesses of Atlantis had discovered many of the deepest secrets of the universe. They had come to understand all about reincarnation, karma, and the innermost workings of the Enlightenment Cycle.
Frederick Lenz
25.
Enlightenment, or true happiness, is not a transcendental state. It is a condition of broad wisdom, boundless energy, and good fortune wherein we each shape our own destiny, find fulfillment in daily activities, and come to understand our ultimate purpose in life.
Josei Toda
26.
A burrito is a delicious food item that breaks down all social barriers and leads to temporary spiritual enlightenment.
Lisi Harrison
27.
The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)
Thomas Ligotti
28.
Do not try to correct the mind. Trying to correct the mind is like trying to correct the waves in the ocean. Can you stop the waves in the ocean? If you want to see an ocean without waves you only have to dive deeper. When you dive deep inside you will experience the stillness of the ocean. And if it is all frozen that is enlightenment.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
29.
The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.
Susan McClary
30.
Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
Walter Isaacson
31.
Hip-Hop is my vehicle to scientific and universal enlightenment
GZA
32.
Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.
Derrick Bell
33.
Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
Immanuel Kant
34.
The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.
Michael Polanyi
35.
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.
Joko Beck
36.
Looking for enlightenment is like looking for a flashlight when all you need the flashlight for is to find the flashlight.
Lew Welch
37.
The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.
Kenneth Burke
38.
Enlightenment isn't found with a full stomach, or on a soft pillow.
Conrad Anker
39.
I don't want enlightenment, I want him. Sorry Buddha, I loved him more than you.
John Burdett
40.
Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.
Tahir Shah
42.
Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force.
Eckhart Tolle
43.
To start from the self and try to understand all things is delusion. To let the self be awakened by all things is enlightenment.
Dogen
44.
Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
Immanuel Kant
46.
Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
Herbert Simon
47.
Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident-prone.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
48.
Consider a very natural process, menstruation, and how the association has been created in which this process is dirty, degrading.
Frederick Lenz
49.
One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence.
Voltaire
50.
Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.
Dogen