The left has come to regard common sense – the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community – as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
From Caesar’s legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.
Ask me not, ‘Are you rightwing,’ but ask me ‘Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?’ Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the ‘Wealth of Nations’ and the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments,’ then I’m rightwing.
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.
I still consider myself a liberal in the Enlightenment sense of the word. But I have to admit that being a liberal these days is confusing.
Our sexual lives are maintained by the shadow side and the light side, so the more we can understand and embrace enlightenment, the less need there is for chemical enhancement.
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.
Many spiritual teachers – in Buddhism, in Islam – have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.
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.
Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn’t just by conquest. It’s through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.
I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that’s been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.
Movies can be instruments of enlightenment.
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.
Christianity and Judaism have gone through the process of enlightenment, making them creative and constructive elements in society.
The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.
Bodhisattva is enlightened in the Buddhist philosophy, religion, tradition. He’s enlightened. It’s fine – I don’t really fight it – but many people use the term ‘zen’ and terms like ‘nirvana,’ ‘enlightenment’ in an almost superficial way. It’s not that complicated.
Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.
Evil is an attack against human spiritual development and enlightenment. All evil, badness, neurosis – it has one motive and one motive only, which is to destroy – to destroy your chance of arising above yourself.
People can hate on you for doing what it is that makes you happy, but ultimately, it has to belong to you. It shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Life is not easy. The road to happiness is not a path well trotted. You have to find your own path to enlightenment.
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment’s greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
Not creating delusions is enlightenment.
Many spiritual teachers – in Buddhism, in Islam – have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.
There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
Enlightenment is the key to everything, and it is the key to intimacy, because it is the goal of true authenticity.
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.
It is at best insufficient and at worst inaccurate to settle on a definition of the Enlightenment, for the obvious reason that there was not just one.
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.
And as long as you’re subject to birth and death, you’ll never attain enlightenment.
In a way, light unites the spiritual world and the ephemeral, physical world. People frequently talk about spiritual experiences using the vocabulary of light: Saul on the road to Damascus, near-death experiences, samadhi or the light-filled void of Buddhist enlightenment.
It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.
Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who’d rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.
Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.
Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.
Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.
The Enlightenment diamond-shaped society, with a huge, prosperous, socially-mobile, empowered middle class, is by far the most productive and creative system the world has ever seen.
Enlightenment must come little by little – otherwise it would overwhelm.
Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.
We’re in an age of enlightenment, and we have a choice as a society which path to take.
For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.
What fun is life if it’s taken so seriously, and what fun is yoga and the search for enlightenment if we are tight, tense, and clenched up from the inside out?
I love the way Monteverdi’s opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
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.
Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.
The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
Europe and the world are waiting for us to defend the spirit of the enlightenment everywhere.
Contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment shouldn’t overgeneralize: the Enlightenment, however it is defined, is not an unalloyed good.
Borrowing knowledge of reality from all sources, taking the best from every study, Science of Mind brings together the highest enlightenment of the ages.
God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.
I don’t believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws.
Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
