Quotes about Enlightenment

Learn how to carry a friendship greatly, whether or not it is returned. Why should one regret if the receiver is not equally generous? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining.

and beauty and goodness comes to each man directly, in flashes of spiritual light

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Spiritual Laws," Essays and Lectures . (Library of America November 15, 1983)

Tragically, I cannot help but wonder if we have now abandoned truth to return to the palace, and rather than sitting alone under a tree waiting for enlightenment, we gravitate to mass entertainment under lights that cater to mass ignorance.

If you are already a Christian, then you also have a task before you—to articulate the truth about Christ, to defend it, to share it, to preserve it, to pass it along to the next generations. As J. B. Phillips so powerfully renders 2 Corinthians 4:6: "God, who first ordered light to shine in darkness, has flooded our hearts with his light, so that we can enlighten men with the knowledge of the glory of God, as we see it in the face of Christ.

No matter how much we know in any area there are always new things to learn and things we have previously learned that we need to be refreshed in.

Lack of knowledge causes fear, and knowledge removes it.

My judgment is that as long as the pastors of the church are embarrassed by this urgent language to God and assume in our Enlightenment model that such rhetoric has no actual force, we will not get very far in the struggle for justice.

If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament, to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Quotes. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

If thine eye be single, the whole body is full of light