Becoming Enlightened Quotes

Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom. ~ Robert A.F. Thurman

Figuring out our gifts in life is part of our journey to becoming enlightened human beings. ~ Allison DuBois

The saying "no self, no problem" probably comes from Zen. In their cultures, where Buddhism is kind of taken for granted, as well as karma, causality, former and future life, and the possibility for becoming enlightened, then it's safe to skirt the danger of nihilism, which would be, I don't exist because Buddha said I have no self, and therefore I have no problem because I don't exist. That would be a bad misunderstanding. But in those cultures, it would not be as easy to have that understanding as it would be here in the west, where we really are nihilistic. ~ Robert Thurman

Becoming enlightened doesn't mean everything works your way. ~ Frederick Lenz

Becoming enlightened is not special, but it's unusual. ~ Frederick Lenz

Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love. ~ Osho

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It
has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the
crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing
through the facade of pretence. It's the
complete eradication of everything we
imagined to be true. ~ Adyashanti

SHOHAKU OKUMURA ~ If we feel we're becoming enlightened, that's delusion. ~ Kosho Uchiyama

Experience life in all possible ways
good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,
summer-winter. Experience all the dualities.
Don't be afraid of experience, because
the more experience you have, the more
mature you become. ~ Osho

As it turns out, it was that very rock bottom that became the most firm foundation I had ever planted my feet on. A foundation so solid, it finally provided the springboard I needed to outrun that teasing, taunting shadow of unworthiness that had followed me my entire life. ~ Mandy Hale

After all, conflict arises, does it not, through the desire to be something, to be other than what is. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Someday it will vanish here as well, replaced by the skeleton of the store where someone fell in love, someone had their heart broken, someone died, because that's the way it works here, in this palimpsest twilight, where America overwrites America in an eternal dance of old becoming new becoming old again. ~ Seanan McGuire

To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. ~ Alexander Hamilton

I'm gonna take all my sadness, frustration, anger and energy and channel it into becoming the best possible student.

I am going to become a learning machine...

Go ahead, go to all your parties. Go ahead and go home to your families and friends every weekend. You are probably smarter than me. But it doesn't matter. While you are goofing around, I'm gonna be studying, and I'm gonna catch you. ~ Peter Rogers

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow. ~ Jim Thompson

Becoming unshakeable through this storm. ~ Nikki Rowe

If I live to be sixteen, I shall never fully understand the rich complexities of human nature. Not sure that I want to, either. It would be a lifetime's work, and brooding over the mysteries of existence is bad for your health. Look what happens to philosophers. Most of them end up barking mad, taking to the bottle, or becoming professors of existentialism at obscure universities. ~ Peter Mayle

I got the letter about becoming a Sir in 2000, the same year that Pauline asked me if we could finally get married. My assistant, Colette, called up and it turned out both the wedding and the Buck House ceremony were happening on the same day. I was knighted at 11 and married at four. She became an instant Lady. ~ Paul Smith

There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement. ~ Caroline Kennedy

You put too much importance on the man that you once were and not enough on the one you are becoming. ~ Melissa McPhail

Science fiction is more than just our collective dreams for a human race that reaches to the stars. In many ways, the dreams of yesterday are becoming the realities of today and the path for tomorrow. ~ George Takei

My success has a lot to do with my private life. I've matured a lot by first becoming a husband and now a father. My life is in the right direction. And that helps a player to thrive. One thing is linked with the other. My private life has helped me. ~ Novak Djokovic

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ashamed of my body, I just don't see any reason to not cover it up as much as possible ... I'm someone who considered becoming a nun, for the outfit. ~ Julia Sweeney

A defense strategy favored by many "spiritual" people is an elaborate form of denial, an assertion that the individual has "gone beyond" the shadow qualities of sexuality, anger, passion, desire, and self-interest. Many religions cater exclusively to this strategy. Priests, ministers, gurus, and "enlightened masters" who adopt a posture of transcendent superiority have great appeal to people with similar defense systems, who are able to escape their personal confrontations by identifying as members of an elite, 'enlightened' group. ~ Starhawk

We started getting hungry again, and some of the women started chanting, "MEAT, MEAT, MEAT!"
We were having steak tartare. It was the only appropriate main course we could think of, for such a graceless theme, and seeing as nobody in the club was confident making it, we had to order it in. I made chips to serve with it, though. I deep-fried them in beef fat.
The steak was served in little roulades, raw and minced, like horsemeat. It was topped with a raw egg yolk, chopped onions, pickled beetroot, and capers. I had wanted to use the Wisconsin version, which is served on cocktail bread and dubbed "cannibal sandwich," but Stevie insisted we go classic. Not everyone could stomach theirs with the raw egg yolk, too, and so, unusually for a Supper Club, there was quite a lot left over.
We took another break to drink and move about the room. Some of us took MDMA. Emmeline had brought a box of French macarons, tiny pastel-colored things, which we threw over the table, trying to get them into one another's mouth, invariably missing.
For our proper dessert, we had a crepe cake: a stack of pancakes bound together with melted chocolate. We ate it with homemade ice cream, which was becoming a real staple. ~ Lara Williams

And if you decide to kill somebody,
make it anybody and not somebody:
some men are made of more special, precious parts:
do not kill if you will a president or a King or a man behind a desk -
these have heavenly longitudes
enlightened attitudes.
If you decide,
take us
who stand and smoke and glower;
we are rusty with sadness
and
feverish
with climbing broken ladders ~ Charles Bukowski

Becoming Christlike is a lifetime pursuit and very often involves growth and change that is slow, almost imperceptible. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

The result of becoming tolerant towards sin is that we become intolerant towards God and His Word. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony

History is littered with examples of men who would become gods, but only one example of God becoming Man. ~ Albert Einstein

Before his and Pushkin's advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called "classical" writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim "accepted colors" (in the sense of "idées reçues") yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

To image the being of God towards the world, to be the priest of creation, is to behave towards the world in all its aspects, of work, and of play, in such a way that it may come to be what it was created to be, that which praises its maker by becoming perfect in its own way. In all this, there is room for both usefulness and beauty to take their due place, but differently according to differences of activity and object. ~ Colin Gunton

I have been blessed to realize my dream of becoming an underwater photojournalist, but with that, I feel an obligation and sense of urgency to share what I have seen with others. ~ Brian Skerry

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer. ~ Joshua Ferris

The family's dream was to see me receive a high degree abroad and to return to become a university professor - on the door to my study room, a sign was placed reading 'Dr. Ahmed,' even though I was still far from becoming a doctor. ~ Ahmed Zewail

The other wives and I talked together one night about the possibility of becoming widows. What would we do? God gave us peace of heart, and confidence that whatever might happen, His Word would hold. We knew that 'when He Putteth forth His sheep, He goeth before them.' God's leading was unmistakable up to this point. Each of us knew when we married our husbands that there would never be any question about who came first -- God and His work held held first place in each life. It was the condition of true discipleship; it became devastatingly meaningful now.

It was a time for soul-searching, a time for counting the possible cost. Was it the thrill of adventure that drew our husbands on? No. Their letters and journals make it abundantly clear that these men did not go out as some men go out to shoot a lion or climb a mountain. Their compulsion was from a different source. Each had made a personal transaction with God, recognising that he belonged to God, first of all by creation, and secondly by redemption through the death of His Son, Jesus Christ. This double claim on his life settled once and for all the question of allegiance. It was not a matter of striving to follow the example of a great Teacher. To conform to the perfect life of Jesus was impossible for a human being. To these men, Jesus Christ was God, and had actually taken upon Himself human form, in order that He might die, and, by His death, provide not only escape from the punishment which their sin meri ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin. ~ Sandra Cisneros

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color. ~ Toni Morrison

The goal of our lives should be nothing less that becoming so familiar with the "mind of Christ" that we could write Jesus' speeches. ~ Clare De Graaf

Kaluza also gave an answer as to where the fifth dimension was. Since we see no evidence of a fifth dimension, it must have "curled up" so small that it cannot be observed. (Imagine taking a two-dimensional sheet of paper and rolling it up tightly into a cylinder. From a distance, the cylinder looks like a one-dimensional line. In this way, a two-dimensional object has been turned into a one-dimensional object by curling it up.)

Kaluza's paper initially created a sensation. But in the coming years, objections were found to his theory. What was the size of this new fifth dimension? How did it curl up? No answers could be found.

For decades Einstein would work on this theory in fits and starts. After he passed away in 1955, the theory was soon forgotten, becoming just a strange footnote to the evolution of physics. ~ Michio Kaku

An enlightened entertainer, via story, casts her line into the souls of others, hooks their heart, and pulls their greater potential to the surface. ~ Derek Rydall

It's not as important what a woman is as what she's becoming ~ Linda Dillow

Do not be a sniveler. Do not say you can't be happy, you can't be enlightened. How do you know? It is all chaos. ~ Frederick Lenz

The stars winked through the beech leaves. She'd read that new stars tended to form in pairs. Binary stars, orbiting in close proximity, only becoming single stars when their partner was smashed off them by another pair of wildly spinning new stars. If she pretended hard enough, she could see the multitude of pairs clinging to each other in the destructive and creative gravity of their constellations. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Since nothing appears to me to give Children so much becoming Confidence and Behavior, and so raise them to the conversation of those above their Age, as Dancing. I think they should be taught to dance as soon as they are capable of learning it. ~ John Locke

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
[As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website.] ~ Henning Mankell

What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television? ~ Wendell Berry

Human is a suffered mind but an enlightened soul. ~ Santosh Kalwar

People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had. ~ Michael Ende

My closest friends from Israel make fun of me for becoming an American, and my American friends make fun of how Israeli I am ... I can't win. ~ Alona Tal

[W]e currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make us and others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as a part of life,
as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility. ~ Sarah Schulman

I throw a leather biker jacket over everything. It adds an instant downtown cool vibe and stops a look becoming too girlie. Bonus points if you wear it like a cape! ~ Ashley Madekwe

No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in. ~ John Keats

One habit: choosing a book and starting each day with a dedicated time of reading and gazing, becoming an apprentice to a mind I admire. ~ Frances Mayes