Zitat des Tages über Erleuchtung / Enlightenment:
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.
There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
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.
Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
At the Cruiserweight Classic finale, I said... I don't know if people had looked it up, or if they had heard it before, but it was an old Zen proverb. 'Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, you chop wood, carry water.' It can be interpreted a lot of ways, but for the most part it's about staying in the moment.
Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.
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.
Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.
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.
Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
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.
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.
And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.
Europe and the world are waiting for us to defend the spirit of Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.
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.
Movies can be instruments of enlightenment.
Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
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.
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.
If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.
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.
My music is not just about entertainment. It is about enlightenment also.
The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
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.
Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
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.
You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.
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.
