Quotes and Sayings about enlightenment

Enlightenment Topics

[on his movie The Butterfly Effect (2004)] I thought that it was a fantastic metaphor for life, and pretty enlightening. And I appreciated the opportunity to play a character that's blind to the trauma that takes place in his life. The violence that is in the movie I thought was a fantastic metaphor for how blind we are as a society, and as a people, to the things that actually do happen on a day-to-day basis, and how we kind of just block them out. And whether it be through our media or whatever, we go, "Oh, it's not happening in my world, so it's not happening". In the movie there's a great representation of the violence with the kids, and the pedophilia, and these kind of things that the guys could have taken the easy road, and kind of squeamishly cut around, but they weren't afraid of it.

Tags: enlightenment

Noi tutti siamo esiliati

entro lo cornici di uno strano quadro.

Chi sa questo, viva da grande,

Gli altri sono insetti.

Tags: enlightenment spiritual

When you dig a well, there's no sign of water until you reach it, only rocks and dirt to move out of the way. You have removed enough; soon the pure water will flow,

Tags: buddha buddhism enlightenment

They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

Tags: enlightenment identity knowledge

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name

Tags: antisemitism assimilation atheism christianity dialectics education enlightenment ethics evil exile germans haskalah intellect islam judaism life messianism monotheism plagiarism prohibitions prophecy rabbis rebbes religion return rituals study thought

Everything transitory is but an image.

Tags: enlightenment

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

Tags: difficulties enlightenment humor inspirational road

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship

Tags: atheism bastille bullying censorship demagogy dictatorship enlightenment fascism fatwa friendship hate humor individualism intimidation iran irony khomeini literature love principles religion rushdie stupidity theocracy

The sea is only the embodiment of a

supernatural and wonderful existence.

It is nothing but love and emotion;

it is the

Tags: enlightenment exploration infinite journey meditation spirituality transcendance

I've learned .... That opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss.

Tags: enlightenment wisom

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

Tags: enlightenment heresy

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

Tags: 2010 atheism britain copernicus credulity darwin enlightenment fundamentalism galileo islam monarchy newton politics principles reason religion republicanism revelation science scientists souls stupidity truth turing universe

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.