Top 130 Enlightenment Quotes

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.

Amputechture’ is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I believe that politicians have a public trust to further debates about important issues. I firmly believe that every public debate holds the prospect of enlightenment.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

We live in the age of entitlement, as opposed to enlightenment.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.

I momentarily but genuinely believed that Barack Obama was the answer not only to our nation’s depressing politics but to the question of our racial enlightenment.

Borrowing knowledge of reality from all sources, taking the best from every study, Science of Mind brings together the highest enlightenment of the ages.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

Hip-hop is my vehicle for scientific enlightenment. It wasn’t until my music career matured where I was exposed to science as an intellectual pursuit.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

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.

I think that technology is essentially a continuation of a divestment of theological power that’s been happening since The Enlightenment. It’s the idea that God can see and hear everything.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter – which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking ‘enlightenment’ meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.

Three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the coffee house became the center of innovation.

Singers like Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar are very conscious of what’s going on around them, and they’re waking up lot of young people with that knowledge. They bring their enlightenment to the world; the world that is buying their records.

I was already writing about the idea of a ‘multiverse’ in the 1970s, though I might have called it the ‘pluriverse.’ How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let’s not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Prince didn’t want to celebrate birthdays but to live life, to elevate and educate to the next level of enlightenment.

The Bible and several other self help or enlightenment books cite the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that we do, that is sinful… or fun for that matter.

My Lords temporal, today is the day to rise up against the regiment of Lords spiritual and proclaim the values of enlightenment, compassion and common sense.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It’s reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

I’m a creature of the eighteenth century at heart: The Enlightenment and the search for happiness suit me.

Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.

It’s wrong to look at what we call ‘Enlightenment values’ as some fad of the 18th century. It’s deeply rooted in ancient history.

If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.

Gene Roddenbury felt that television was being wasted. That it had the potential for enlightenment and even inspiration.

One of the Age of Enlightenment’s most hypnotic images is Ledoux’s rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 – 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.

We who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.

To me, the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.

I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.

And as long as you’re subject to birth and death, you’ll never attain enlightenment.

Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It’s very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God’s great plan.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.

Europe and the world are waiting for us to defend the spirit of Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.

In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to Spirit.

Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution.

In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America’s naive faith that it had reinvented politics.

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness, more human enlightenment than from any other way.