Illumination Quotes

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Men's and nations' finest hour consist of those moments when extraordinary challenge is met by extraordinary response. Hence in those darkest hours, we must light our individual candles rather than vying with others to call attention to the enveloping darkness. Our indignation about injustice should lead to illumination, for if it does not, we are only adding to the despair-and the moment of gravest danger is when there is so little light that darkness seems normal!

The end for which we are created invites us to walk a road that is surely sown with a lot of thorns, but it is not sad; through even the sorrow, it is illuminated by joy.

‎"With any major decision there are cautions and considerations to make, but once there has been illumination, beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it and trusted it and lived for it, it ...is right now. Don't give up when the pressure mounts. Certainly don't go to that being who is bent on your destruction of your happiness. Face your doubts. Master your fears. 'Cast not away therefore your confidence.' Stay the course and see the beauty of life unfold for you.

Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

Sometimes, a flame can be utterly extinguished. Sometimes, a flame can shrink and waver, but sometimes a flame refuses to go out. It flares up from the faintest ember to illuminate the darkness, to burn in spite of overwhelming odds.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Don't hate the arising of thoughts or stop the thoughts that do arise. Simply realize that our original mind, right from the start, is beyond thought, so that no matter what, you never get involved with thoughts. Illuminate original mind, and no other understanding is necessary.

Your intelligence is a fire that can illuminate any darkness. Awaken and let your mind burn so brightly! You are alive for a reason!

Pray to God with tears in your eyes whenever you want illumination or find yourself faced with any doubt or difficulty. The Lord will remove all your impurities, assuage your mental anguish, and give you enlightenment.

The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Light and color are closely linked. The colors can make a crucial change in nature, if you switch from daylight to artificial light or just from strong to weak illumination. In addition, color perception is affected by the material structure. Even if a piece of textile can have the same color as a shiny enamel plate, then they will act completely different.

This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.

For a servant of God to have authority in every sentence he utters, he must first suffer for the message he is to deliver. Without great tribulation, there is no great illumination.

If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.

Madness, and then illumination.

Intuitive knowledge is an illumination of the soul,
whereby it beholds in the light of God those things which it pleases Him to reveal to us by a direct impression of divine clearness.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

So long as one does not become simple like a child, one does not get divine illumination. Forget all the worldly knowledge that thou hast acquired and become as a child, and then will thou get the divine wisdom.

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

Just like the car headlights impressively illuminating the dark streets, wisdom words powerfully enlighten the dark minds!

To understand a Bible text it takes an act of the Holy Spirit equal to the act that inspired the text in the first place. A revelation of the Holy Spirit in one glorious flash of inward illumination would teach you more of Jesus than five years in a theological seminary.

We do not understand and then obey: that is instruction. We obey by faith, and then we understand: that is illumination.

When we try to make everything clear, we make everything confused. If, however, we admit one mysterious thing in the universe, then everything else becomes clear in the light of that. The sun is so bright, so mysterious, that one cannot look at it, and yet in the light of the sun everything else is seen.

Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.

In meditation, silently and serenely, all words are transcended. In Illumination, all things appear as is. Silence is the ceasing of ego-grasping. Illumination is the functioning of the wonder of wisdom. The unity of these two is awakening to Buddha Nature.

It will be celebrated... with pomp and parade... bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.

Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.

Illumination by the Spirit is the endless end of every virtue.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

A man of distinguished, beautiful eloquence, and persistent, over pressing thought... Ameen Rihani was one of the foremost pioneers of modern illumination. He firmly believed in the significance of reviving the Arab spirit and protecting the freedom of thought and the freedom of human conscience.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.

Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

If you take from a theory only the conclusions you like and discard the rest, you are using the theory as a drunkard uses a lamp post-for support rather than illumination.

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.

The rainbow is elusive, and its colors but the illumination of tears.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

I sincerely believe that there is a time in life for drifting. There is a time for sitting back and getting in touch with yourself. Some of our most interesting illuminations and ideas will come when we take time to reflect, time to kick back and cruise awhile.

One of the outcomes of a Spirit-filled life is a new illumination to understand God's Word.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

serene illumination, or just sitting, is not a technique, or a means to some resulting higher state of consciousness, or any particular state of being. Just sitting, one simply meets the immediate present. Desiring some flashy experience, or anything more or other than 'this' is mere worldly vanity and craving.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

We can find meaning and reward by serving some higher purpose than ourselves, a shining purpose, the illumination of a Thousand Points of Light...We all have something to give.

Most striking at first is the appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long unconscious prior work.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.