Enlightenment Quotations | Page 3

The greatest obstacle to enlightenment is getting past your delusion that you are not already enlightened.

Truly, he thought, the way of enlightenment is like unto half a mile of broken glass.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.

Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn't it?

An enlightened person does not ignore things and does not stick to things, not even to the truth.

It is not after we understand the truth that we attain enlightenment. To realize the truth is to live - to exist here and now.

Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.

Don't move. Just die over and over. Don't anticipate. Nothing can save you now because you have only this moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now because there are no other moments. With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully. Don't move.

Although we have no actual written communications from the world of emptiness, we have some hints or suggestions about what is going on in that world, and that is, you might say, enlightenment. When you see plum blossoms or hear the sound of a small stone hitting bamboo, that is a letter from the world of emptiness.

You can't make a date with enlightenment.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

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.

Since life is but a continuous series of experiences, everything ultimately helps me towards my final enlightenment.

Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

The Bible has been used as a way of making us accept our situation, and not to bring enlightenment to the poor.

No one's life is totally morbid. Even on a subtle scale there's little flashes of enlightenment and of happiness and joy.

Enlightenment will be now the beginning, not the end. Beginning of a non-ending process in all dimensions of richness.

Create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

Only the rich can achieve enlightenment because the poor are too busy looking for fridge freezers.

Nothing has to be changed, because all is beautiful - that is enlightenment. All is as it should be, everything is perfect. This is the most perfect world, this moment lacks nothing - the experience of this is what enlightenment is.

Enlightenment is choicelessness. But don`t misunderstand me. Before that, you will have to move very cautiously, choosing the right against the wrong, choosing the truer so that you can reach to the ultimate truth.

Enlightenment is always through surrender, but surrender is achieved through intelligence. Only idiots cannot surrender. To surrender you need great intelligence. To see the point of surrender is the climax of insight; to see the point that you are not separate from existence is the highest that intelligence can give to you.

It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.

Enlightenment is freedom, the thought of enlightenment is prison. The truth exists in the moment. If we´re anywhere else, seeking something outside of the moment, we´re in prison.

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”)

The moment of enlightenment is when a person's dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.

We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.

Enlightenment says the world is nothing Nothing but a dream, everything's an illusion And nothing is real.

Enlightenment, don't know what it is. It's up to you, the way you think.

Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

The enlightened attention rejects nothing nor welcomes anything-like a mirror it responds equally to all.

Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible. The latter procedure is more difficult and therefore, unpopular.

When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.

Great beauty, great strength, and great riches are really and truly of no great use; a right heart exceeds all

Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty.

Through meditative techniques, one can free the mind of delusions and attain what we call enlightenment.

True enlightenment is nothing but the nature of one's own self being fully realized.

According to accounts of the Buddha's life, it would seem that he had a very deep relationship with nature. He was not born in the royal palace but in a park, under a sala tree. He attained complete enlightenment under the bodhi tree and left this earth to enter Parinirvana, again, between three sala trees. It would seem that the Buddha was very fond of trees.

I think the degree of a nation's civilisation may be measured by the degree of enlightenment of its women.

[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident-prone.

Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else

One of my purposes is to use the television show as a voice to not only entertain people, as I did in the beginning, but as a source of information, as a source of enlightenment, wherever we can, and also as a source of lifting people up wherever you can.

Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing]; the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment.

Your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is 'the quiet acceptance of what is'.

Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.

Enlightenment demands that you take responsibility for your way of life.

Enlightenment is your ego's greatest disappointment.

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.