Enlightenment quotes
628 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside enlightenment — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"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."
"Remember, the greatest gift to give people your enlightenment, to share it. It has to be the greatest."
"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."
"Even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don’t seek to become free or desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become present."
"The approach is that the best way to use unwanted circumstances on the path of enlightenment is not to resist but to lean into them."
"Unity consciousness is a state of enlightenment where we pierce the mask of illusion which creates separation and fragmentation. Behind the appearance of separation is one unified field of wholeness. Here the seer and the scenery are one."
"Because not even the least Dharma is there found or got at. Therefore is it called 'utmost, right and perfect enlightenment'. Self-identical is that Dharma and nothing is therein at variance. Therefore is it called 'utmost, right and perfect enlighten'"
"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."
"Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality."
"Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success."
"Truly, he thought, the way of enlightenment is like unto half a mile of broken glass."
"Sexual enlightenment is that hardhearted process which for hygienic reasons forbids young people to satisfy their curiosity themselves."
"I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment."
"You are a Buddha, and so is everyone else. I didn't make that up. It was the Buddha himself who said so. He said that all beings had the potential to become awakened. To practice walking meditation is to practice living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and enlightenment are one. Enlightenment leads to mindfulness and mindfulness leads to enlightenment."
"Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing]; the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment."
"In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself."
"True enlightenment is nothing but the nature of one's own self being fully realized."
"Through meditative techniques, one can free the mind of delusions and attain what we call enlightenment."
"If there isn't an emanation of love and joy, complete presence and openness toward all beings, then it is not enlightenment."
"You are not seeking to attain some future state. That is the fallacy of many spiritual seekers. They have an image of some state - enlightenment, or whatever they call it - they want to achieve."
