Quest for Enlightenment Quotes

History is a record of the incessant struggle of humanity against ignorance and oppression.

At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,and I intend to end up there. Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

One who is in search of knowledge should give up the search of pleasure and the one who is in search of pleasure should give up the search of knowledge.

To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.

It is wisdom that is seeking for wisdom.

Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I have looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

Questioners sooner or later end up in a library... And answers are dangerous; they kill your wonder.

All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I've even heard people say that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.

Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.

I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn't what I was after at all.

There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.

I think that we all at some point are in search of something - a higher power, whatever you want to call it, the meaning of life. I know I was, especially at even my son's age in my 20s, and dabbling in Eastern philosophies and yoga and Buddhism and Christianity and Islam. I kind of touched them all, you know, just trying to figure out the meaning of life or if nothing else, figure myself out.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.

The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.

Life in this world is an attempt to see God.

God grant that by my persevering labours I may bring a little stone to the frail and ill-assured edifice of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably failed.

The world is a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell "God" with the wrong blocks.

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.

I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one — the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.

There aren't many such enthusiasts born. The average person is not especially curious about the world. He is alive, and being somehow obliged to deal with this condition, feels the less effort it requires, the better. Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great all-consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact - to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, mainly to preserve onself within oneself.

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.