Enlightenment Religion Quotes & Sayings

Your heart is your temple. — Suzy Kassem

In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science. — Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

The avoidance of that which causes you pain does not produce enlightenment. It produces avoidance. Religion is the avoidance of pain and suffering. — Frederick Lenz

There is no secret in attaining God. In the path of Enlightenment, any theoretical mystery-mongering preacher that weakens the mind, should be rejected at once. Science has no secrets. The very purpose of it is to unravel the secrets of Nature and the Universe. That is why it is so beautiful. And so should be the path of Enlightenment. — Abhijit Naskar

Henry revealed the strategies Entz Media used to break marriages apart. Entz programming pushed the idea of marriage being stale and uneventful and then glamorized a freer and more exciting life outside of marriage. Institutions that upheld chastity before marriage and fidelity within marriage were ridiculed. Storylines relating to religion centered on religious conspiracies and how people gained enlightenment apart from God, not from Him. The idea of commitment -- to a wife, a child, a religion -- was ridiculed. Selfishness was championed. — Patrick Ord

They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. — Haruki Murakami

Our religion, with its beliefs, rituals, and dogmas becomes another segment among all the other segments that constitute our linear and fragmented existence. It offers us another set of possible acquisitions, even more tempting than all the others: a meaning to life, immortality, enlightenment, the kingdom of heaven. — Stephen Batchelor

I plan to make the case that we need to move beyond religion if we want to continue the kind of remarkable intellectual and social progress we've enjoyed since the "Enlightenment. — Alan Jeskin

He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man. — Gautama Buddha

It is the ultimate religion, through which all humans neuropsychologically morph into Buddhas, or Enlightened Beings. — Abhijit Naskar

childish. Thereupon Filomena excused herself, that she might put a clean shirt on Jacopone, and Odo was left to his melancholy musings. His mind had of late run much on economic abuses; but what was any philandering with reform to this close contact with misery? It was as though white hungry faces had suddenly stared in at the windows of his brightly-lit life. What did these people care for education, enlightenment, the religion of humanity? What they wanted was fodder for their cattle, a bit of meat on Sundays and a faggot on the hearth. — Edith Wharton

Whether or not enlightenment is a plausible goal for us is a vital question for our lives. If it is possible for us to attain such perfect enlightenment ourselves, our whole sense of meaning and our place in the universe immediately changes. To be open to the possibility is to be a spiritual seeker, no matter what our religion. Enlightenment is not meant to be an object of religious faith. It is an evolutionary goal ... — Robert Thurman

I think we should be very clear on this ... this country was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment ... It was the idea that people could talk, reason, have dialogue, discuss the issues. It wasn't founded on the idea that someone would get struck by a divine inspiration and know everything right from wrong. I mean, people who founded this country had religion, they had strong beliefs, but they believed in reason, in dialogue, in civil discourse. We can't lose that in this country. We've got to get it back. — Wesley Clark

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the
encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden
assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made
in search of personal power ... all mingled with shreds of enlightenment.
And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But
we do anyway. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to
which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the
harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity. — Brian Herbert

Only through Absolution will you reach the Absolute. — Toni Petrinovich

As I stumbled into confusion about what was real and what was not, the strangest thing happened: The world disintegrated. Reality collapsed, or my perception of it. It ripped apart like a dry skin under pressure, giving way to something I can only describe as ineffable dimensions, depths upon depths. — Stefan Emunds

For millennia, religions in general, and Jewish, Christian, and Islamic churches in particular, have had little problem with the forced enslavement of hundreds of millions of people. It was only after the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment that rational arguments were proffered for the abolition of the slave trade, influenced by and citing such secular documents as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. After an unconscionably long lag time, religion finally got on board the abolition train and became instrumental in helping to propel it forward. — Michael Shermer

Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things - doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. — J.D. Salinger

May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog? ... In our religion, we believe in reincarnation. We live many times, you see, always seeking to be wiser and more virtuous. If we eventually lead a blameless life, a perfect life, we leave this world and need not endure it again. Between our human lives, we may be reincarnated as other creatures. Sometimes, when someone has led a nearly perfect life but is not yet worthy of nirvana, that person is reincarnated as a very beautiful dog. When the life as the dog comes to an end, the person is reincarnated one last time as a human being, and lives a perfect life. Your dog is a person who has almost arrived at complete enlightenment and will in the next life be perfect and blameless, a very great person. You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul. — Dean Koontz

The world's religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces. — Michael Shermer

Often in history we see that religion, which was meant to raise us and make us better and nobler, has made people behave like beasts. Instead of bringing enlightenment of them, it has often tried to keep them in the dark; instead of broadening their minds, it has frequently made them narrow-minded and intolerant of others. — Jawaharlal Nehru

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our natures as well.

"The Limits Of The World — Diane Williams

If you stay on this path as long as I have, you'll soon learn that the road to providence leads right through perdition. And along that road, the devil's waiting to collect his pound of flesh. — Jay Grewal

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. — Tony Campolo

Irrespective of caste, gender and religion people who slaughter women in the name of female foeticide, dowry, abuse have no rights to speak on cow slaughter. One is the mother, the other is a daughter. This Dusserah may the Durgatinashini bless us all with the enlightenment of humanity. Happy Dusserah! — Debajani Mohanty

Can't you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind
-Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit The Wind — Jerome Lawrence

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. — Christopher Hitchens

You're right [Joshua], I have taught you nothing. I could teach you nothing. Everything that you needed to know was already there. You simply needed the word for it. Some need Kali and Shiva to destroy the world so they may see past the illusion to divinity in them, others need Krishna to drive them to the place where they may perceive what is eternal in them. Others may perceive the Divine Spark in themselves only by realizing through enlightenment that the spark resides in all things, and in that they find kinship. But because the Divine Spark resides in all, does not mean that all will discover it. Your dharma is not to learn, Joshua, but to teach."
"How will I teach my people about the Divine Spark?"
...
"You must only find the right word. The Divine Spark is infinite, the path to find it is not. The beginning of the path is the word. — Christopher Moore

Bhikkus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?
The eye is burning, visible forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning; also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact as its condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of greed, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion, with birth, ageing and death, with sorrow, with lamentation, with pain, grief and despair it is burning. — Gautama Buddha

The main point of enlightenment is man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion. — Immanuel Kant

Follow both: the call of the mountain of enlightenment and the temptation of the valley of experience. No mountain without valley, no valley without mountain. — Stefan Emunds

There was a lot about the Babylonians, how their religion was the original, the most authentic, how their gods were symbols for another reality, that if one could rediscover their rituals and use them as they were meant to be used, one could gain enlightenment. — Jonathan Aycliffe

Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the "wholly other," a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance. ("A Prologue", Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1.1, Fall 2003, p. 1). — John D. Caputo

In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion. — Salman Rushdie

Once humanity discovers what's behind the mirror of all the ruling class of governments and religions there will be a new beginning of justice called Enlightenment. — Charleston Parker

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete. — Edwin Gaustad

If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on... then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. — Immanuel Kant

The real difference between yoga and religion is this: Religion says believe, do not doubt, often citing the word of God and promises of an eternal afterlife, reciting dogma (unsubstantiated pre-modern myths), while yoga only points the way and urges its students to practice and experience for themselves. In this way yoga is very scientific in its approach to self-knowledge, transcendence and enlightenment. Its message is: Try the practice for yourself and only then can you truly believe. — Gudjon Bergmann

At the age of seventeen, Napoleon's religious views started to coalesce, and they did not change much thereafter. Despite being taught by monks, he was never a true Christian, being unconvinced by the divinity of Jesus. He did believe in some kind of divine power, albeit one that seems to have had very limited interaction with the world beyond its original creation. Later he was sometimes seen to cross himself before battle,77 and, as we shall see, he certainly also knew the social utility of religion. But in his personal beliefs he was essentially an Enlightenment sceptic. — Andrew Roberts

Miracles do not belong to religions. Miracles belong to the desperate, which is why every religion, every philosophy, and most importantly, every fairy tale always has a moment of salvation, a eureka, an enlightenment. We are all chasing and chasing tails, running and running in circles, until a wolf or the witch or the stepmother jumps out and trips us, and we fall flat, splat, and we lie bare and bleeding and breathless and finally, finally look and see whatever it is---salvation or eureka or enlightenment or a hunter or prince or a glass slipper---in front of us. And that's what miracles are. Not solutions, but catalysts. Not answers, but chances. — Amy Zhang

But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightning. — John Green

I'm not sure anyone's ever experienced enlightenment, been born again, been called to repentance or decided to sell their belongings on account of a system. The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you
that wins your heart
religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You've been won over, and you probably didn't see it coming. You've been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn't be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there's one waiting around every corner. It's as near as the story, song or image you can't get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere. — David Dark

I became aware that there was no barrier between what was inside and what was outside. My body was illuminated by a bright light. I heard with my eyes and saw with my ears. I used my nose as mouth and my mouth as nose. I experienced the world with the totality of my senses as my spirit gathered and my form dissolved. There was no distinction between muscles and bones. My body stopped being heavy and I felt like a floating leaf. Without knowing it, I was being carried by the wind. Drifting here and there, I did not know whether I rode on the wind or the wind rode on me. — Liezi

The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance. — Tariq Ali

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that. — Krista Tippett

Most organized religions often succeed in enslaving the soul through useless traditions, prejudices and ideological divisions. Yet, true spiritual enlightenment and everlasting freedom can only be found in the perfect wisdom that LOVE is the truest most fundamental foundation of every faith which should, inevitably, lead every seeker down the path to the most profound introspective spiritual understanding one could ever know...we are all one. — Jason Versey

The ills of the world, and their cures, are listed below: 1) A world of privilege is a world of elitism and injustice. Meritocracy is the cure. 2) Capitalism, the creed of "Greed is good", is the disease of materialism and objectification for the sole purpose of profiting the ownership class. A new spiritual, artistic, creative and intellectual paradigm is the cure. 3) Abrahamism is a mental illness. Illuminism is the psychological cure. 4) The religious divide between East and West has held back global progress. Illuminism, a religion of enlightenment and reincarnation in common with Eastern thinking, yet steeped in the most profound Western thinking, is the bridge. The — Michael Faust

religion does not offer enlightenment; it offers absolute answers and a simplistic guide to life that reassures followers of relief in a spiritual world to come. — Arthur F. Garcia Jr.

Similitude of the heart is like that of a telephone operator between man and God. — Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

I believe that one of the most important properties of a work of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites, and in their fusion to achieve a 'wholeness' or 'oneness,' the experiencing of which should be revelatory - both for the artist and the spectator - something akin to the experience of enlightenment in terms of religion. — Douglas Portway

Ever since the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th Centuries - which, among other things, gave birth to the U.S. Constitution and the de facto motto E Pluribus Unum (out of the many, one) - interfaith tolerance has been sown into the fabric of Western society. The rules of one religion are not made into law for all citizens because of a simple social agreement. For you to believe what you want, you must allow me to do the same, even if we disagree. — Gudjon Bergmann

If there were a reason for preferring the Christian religion to natural religion, it would be because the former offers us, on the nature of God and man, enlightenment that the latter lacks. Now, this is not at all the case; for Christianity, instead of clarifying, gives rise to an infinite multitude of obscurities and difficulties. — Denis Diderot

If one does not make an ego out of gender, one would still know whether one is a man or a woman, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender - whatever else we may think of. But those identities need to fit very loosely and be worn very lightly. All sense of privilege or deprivation that has developed around one's gender identity, all rigidity regarding proper roles and behaviors for the various genders, must be cut through. — Rita M. Gross

Total Enlightenment is 'Vision without Purpose'. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Instant enlightenment. A quintessential modernism, culture and religion accommodated to the age of fast food and bumper stickers. But psyche and spirit are not so exempt from the natural domain that they can simply produce self-change instantaneously, on demand. Wisdom precipitates through a notoriously slow apparatus of retorts and flasks, and it has to find receptive ground only in a properly seasoned mind. — Kenny Smith

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced? — U.G. Krishnamurti

Some perceive God in the heart by the intellect through meditation; others by the yoga of knowledge; and others by the yoga of work. Some, however, do not understand Brahman, but having heard from others, take to worship. They also transcend death by their firm faith to what they have heard. — Anonymous

Since the Enlightenment, the political order is an order of freedom. The political structures are no longer given, previous to man's freedom, but are rather realities based on freedom, taken on and modified by man ... This new definition of politics carefully distinguishes between state and society. The distinction ... allows us to differentiate between the public sphere of the state of the Church (or the combination of them) as powers from the public sphere 'in which the interests of all men as a social group are expressed. — Gustavo Gutierrez

Creative business seminar. Basically a quick, impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorized and digitalized. Very transparent and easy to grasp. And quite a few people get positive encouragement from this. But the fact remains that it's nothing more than an infusion of the hypnotic into a system of thought that suits their goal, a conglomeration of only those theories and statistics that line up with their ultimate objectives. — Haruki Murakami

Two hundred years ago the forces of freedom challenged this idea. The children of the new enlightenment rose up to defy the tyranny of arrogant clergy and the censorship of pious bureaucrats. They boldly proclaimed that the state must be free from religious coercion and that religion must be free from state control. All individuals have the right to pursue the dictates of their own conscience. All citizens even have the right not to be religious at all. — Sherwin Wine

All of us must go through the dance of searching out the answers for enlightenment about God. Sometimes all we get are fleeting moments, flashes of eternity exhibited sporadically within our beautiful and wondrously intricate world. We can deny these moments and rationalize them as some mechanism of the brain, or we can internalize them as Godly revelation from a loving Heavenly Father. — Nancy Phippen Browne

American culture really has two souls. And it's not a question of whether the culture becomes secularized. The culture never becomes one thing or the other. The culture is always two. The culture is always William Bradford and Jonathan Edwards. The culture is always Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. America was born just in time to have two mentalities. We're like Jacob and Esau struggling in the womb. Secular people want to believe that we are a nation of the Enlightenment, and because of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution that secularism will supersede religion. Religious people want to believe that through the revival religion will supersede secularism. And both are wrong. "What's going to happen," he said, "is that there will continue to be a constant dynamic and tension between the two, running side by side.And they're going to keep on being about that for as long as there's an American identity worth talking about. — Bruce Feiler

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. — G.K. Chesterton

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. — Elaine Pagels

The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae (the son of the Sun and Moon) is the possible result as well as the symbol of this union of opposites. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. "It has a thousand names," say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal toward which it aims is nameless, ineffable. — C. G. Jung

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second. — Rajneesh